“Catching a lionfish is like picking up trash on the side of the highway,” says Rachel Bowman, a commercial fisherwoman in Florida who is known as the lionfish huntress. In recent years, the ornate fish, native to the South Pacific and Indian Oceans and popular in home aquariums, have invaded the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. In an effort to stymie their rapid takeover, government agencies have called on citizens to eat lionfish. You can locate them hovering near reefs or rocks. To catch one, use scuba gear and a pole spear. “Just swim right up and shoot them,” says Bowman, who dives from her 25-foot motorboat named Britney Spears.
Don’t worry about rules, in Florida at least: There aren’t any for lionfish. “There’s no limitations on season, how many you can get, the size limit — it’s an absolute free-for-all,” Bowman says. This year, she was part of a three-woman team that caught 926 lionfish in 48 hours to win the Lionfish World Championship in Pensacola, Fla.
Be careful not to get stuck by the fishes’ long, venomous spines. “I’ve seen grown men curled up in balls, crying,” Bowman says. The neuromuscular toxin will make your skin swell and can even cause heart failure. To avoid the spines, transfer the fish directly from your spear into a plastic containment device called a Zookeeper without touching it. If you do get stung, immediately put the affected area in hot water, which destroys proteins in the venom and reduces its potency. “As hot as you can stand without scalding yourself,” says Bowman, who has been stung dozens of times. Wear gloves while filleting the fish.
Eating lionfish is the easy part: cooked, the venom is harmless, and the meat is flaky and mild. Cut off the spines before using it raw in ceviche or sushi. Aside from people like Bowman, who sells her catch to restaurants and markets, lionfish have few natural predators, but they eat more than 50 species of fish. Scientists have called their invasion one of the greatest emerging threats to global biodiversity. “You’re not going to be able to spear every lionfish,” Bowman says, “but if you get the ones you do see, that’s doing a lot more than doing nothing at all.”
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