Roatán Marine Park Lionfish Removal Programme

Lionfish (Pterois volitans/miles), native to the Indo-Pacific, invaded the Caribbean in the 2000s and reached Honduran waters around 2009. As voracious generalist predators with no natural Caribbean predators, they consume juvenile native reef fish and invertebrates at rates that can suppress local fish populations and threaten reef resilience.

In response, the Roatán Marine Park (RMP), together with the Bay Islands Conservation Association, built a community-based control programme around licensed spearfishing. For $70, divers and tourists receive a license, a pole spear and an hour of training; the fee revenue helps fund the park's broader reef patrol and conservation work, and RMP reports that voluntary conservation fees from dive shops and its eco-store cover roughly 50-60% of its enforcement and conservation budget. A parallel market-development effort trains local fishers to catch, clean and sell lionfish, which now appear on the menus of around 40 restaurants across Roatán and Utila and are sold to mainland grocery stores, giving continuous removal a commercial incentive beyond conservation goodwill.

A peer-reviewed 2017 study in PeerJ (Anderson et al.) compared reefs subject to regular removal (two to three culling dives per month, mean catch-per-unit-effort of 2.76 ± 1.72 lionfish per fisher per hour) against non-removal control sites. Removal reefs had 95% lower lionfish biomass and supported 30% higher densities of native prey-sized fish than non-removal sites, though the study found no significant difference in overall native fish species richness or diversity between the two, suggesting the effect operates on prey abundance rather than community composition.

An honest limitation: lionfish females can release tens of thousands of eggs every few days, so populations rebound quickly without sustained effort, and deeper mesophotic reefs beyond normal recreational diving depth remain largely unmanaged, acting as refugia and source populations that recolonize shallower reefs. The programme therefore functions as ongoing population control rather than eradication.

Read the full analysis: https://reefresilience.org/case-studies/honduras-invasive-species/

Read the full analysis: https://reefresilience.org/case-studies/honduras-invasive-species/