28 Lionfish caught off Frederiksted Pier

September 28, 2010
Virgin Islands Daily News
by Daniel Shea

"ST. CROIX — An official and some of the volunteer divers who have made it their mission to rid the coastal waters of the destructive lionfish caught 22 of the invasive species off Frederiksted Pier during the weekend and six more Monday.

What started out as a recreational dive off the Frederiksted Pier Friday turned into a four-day lionfish-hunting expedition, local diver Paul Vrabcak said.

He said he will be diving on the south side of the pier throughout much of the rest of the week, continuing the search for the lionfish.

“We don’t have a year to study what’s going on,” Vrabcak said. “We need to get them out of the water.”

William Coles, chief of environmental education for the V.I. Department of Planning and Natural Resources, has been working with Vrabcak and other volunteer divers to do just that.

Coles teamed up with Vrabcak on Sunday and Monday to search for the invasive species from the Pacific Ocean that has been wreaking havoc on marine life in the Caribbean since it first spilled out of a Florida homeowner’s aquarium during Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

But he had never seen a cluster as big as that found over the weekend off the pier, he said.

“We’ve never caught that many in one spot,” Coles said.

The weekend influx shot the total number of lionfish caught off St. Croix to about 140, Coles said.

“This last week has really upped the numbers a lot,” he said.

By Vrabcak’s own count, he has caught 62 lionfish, he said. It has been with the help of volunteers like Vrabcak and local fishermen that the majority of those lionfish have been removed from the waters, Coles said.

Nearly all of the lionfish caught last weekend were no larger than two inches long, Coles said.

“This looks like it has been a breeding session that has gotten to us,” Coles said.

“We’ll know what’s going on,” he said. “The Frederiksted Pier pier is heavily dived, anyway.”

Vrabcak had a different theory. With the distant passing of Hurricane Igor came a change in weather: The wind and current came down from the northwest — the general direction of Puerto Rico, which has a severe lionfish problem.

“We just had two storms blown through, and the wind was coming from the northwest,” Vrabcak said. “I would tend to believe that these were wind-blown.”

While Vrabcak’s theory differs slightly from Coles’, the two men agree adamantly that they need more funding to comprehensively fight off the lionfish, which eat up just about anything in their path and have no natural predators in the Caribbean to stop them.

“We need money last week,” Coles said. “This is a really critical thing. And we could easily make the mistake and not do anything about it, and then we’d be like everyone else. And that’s not what we want.”

“We need to be working together on this,” he said.