A diver cuts off the lionfish’s 18 venomous spines. (photo by Lori Kunzelman)

Invasion of the Lionfish has Damaged the Roatan Ecosystem

“The lionfish has a voracious appetite, eating everything in the Caribbean except the conch. We found lobsters, shrimp, crab, fish and octopus within their stomachs,” said Nic Bach who runs the Lionfish Invasive Species Containment Program at the Roatan Marine Park (RMP). The diverse life on the island’s reef isn’t equipped to fight back and lionfish have been known to target shrimp cleaning stations, leaving a few small fish to keep the algae growth in check and subjecting entire sections of vibrant coral vulnerable to other stresses. Bach calls it the “largest, widespread invasion since man.”

“Lionfish are aliens here and predators such as a groupers and snappers that would eat them [in areas where they are native] do not identify them as prey,” said Chris Willey, a PADI Master SCUBA Diver Trainer who helps educate divers to responsibly aid in lionfish containment through spearfishing.

Lionfish most likely entered the Atlantic through a release of aquarium individuals beginning in the mid-80s in Florida. Although there is also a theory that the fish may have traveled in the bilge pumps of large tankers making their way from Asia through the Panama Canal to ports in South Florida. They spread through the warm coastal waters at a geometric rate, reaching Roatan in 2009. By 2012 they made it all the way to the eastern edge of the Caribbean. Now they can be found all the way down the coast of Brazil, covering almost the entire Atlantic coast of South America. Lionfish have succeeded here on Roatan like they have everywhere else.

Lionfish have been proliferating, killing everything on the reef

Answering the challenge posed by these invasive predators, the Roatan Marine Park first partnered up with the National Fisheries Department in 2009 to issue spearing licenses to professional diver instructors and dive masters. Today, these licenses can be obtained by anyone after completing a training course through the RMP so even the general public is on the lionfish snorkel patrol.

Thus far in 2018 the Roatan Marine Park has issued more than 200 lionfish permits, a number Bach sees increasing to something like 350 for the whole year, which would be on par with last year’s total and slightly lower than the high of 400 in 2014.

Willey, creator of the PADI Lionfish Hunter distinctive specialty program, which builds on the Roatan Marine Park invasive species containment course, stresses that divers need to ensure that they do not feed lionfish to other marine life. “If we are acting as predators we must act like predators and must remove lionfish for consumption,” Willey said. Otherwise the divers affect fish behavior, teaching groupers, eels and other large predators that “divers give out free food,” which isn’t a smart, safe or sustainable practice.

Roatan recreational divers spear a lionfish. (photo by Lori Kunzelman)

Another key component to successful lionfish containment on Roatan is in doing no harm to the reef. Often it is those trying to do the best for the reef, photographers looking to document new behaviors, spear fishers desperate to bag the biggest catch, and other distracted divers who end up doing the most damage, often exceeding whatever good they hoped to accomplish.“By you hitting a piece of reef that took two years to just grow one inch is doing a lot more damage than that lionfish will ever do,” Bach said.

Some have come up with more creative ways of fighting lionfish. “I was thinking about building some little castles and palaces around the reef, see if we could attract lionfish. You can spear that all you want, you aint gonna hurt anything,” said Jack Mitchell, the longtime chef who has been a passionate advocate for consuming lionfish since being asked to serve them for a marine biologist’s wedding back in 2012.

Tournaments like the first ever Roatan International Lionfish Tournament being held from October 12-14, organized by Buck Beasley, hope to expand recognition of the problems that lionfish present to the vital heart of the tourism industry on Roatan. Beasley decided to put on the tournament “to help locals gain awareness. The goal is to put the lionfish front and center for the local population.” With a top prize of $1,000 for the most lionfish caught from a 4-person team using spear-poles, the derby style tournament hopes to attract attention from crews throughout the Bay Islands and the Caribbean. The tournament also hopes to raise enough funds to help some local free divers get certified and outfitted as professional divers. “We hope to raise funds that will allow us to train and certify local watermen on SCUBA. We want to give these guys opportunities for better livelihoods,” said Beasley, who is licensed by Roatan Marine Park to issue lionfish hunting certifications and has lost count of the number he has issued over the years.

“If you are what you eat, then I’m a lionfish,” said Mitchell, who runs Lionfish Louie’s, which will be hosting a big lionfish cookout the day after the tournament when cash prizes will be awarded in several categories.

Zoe Kunzelman, an eleven-year old girl from Utah, who was recently certified by Beasley and issued a spear-pole, knows she’s doing something good for the reef when she hunts for lionfish. She proudly cuts off the spines and fillets the lionfish before she gets to the surface, but her favorite part of hunting lionfish is when she brings her catch back to the kitchen where they prepare the yummy tasting flaky white fish anyway she likes. Her favorites ways are grilled with barbeque, then mango butter.

There is no limit to how many lionfish a diver can skewer. Even if every last one would end up on a Roatan plate more will drift in on the currents from farther east. “We are never going to eradicate them. We’re simply educating people and creating a demand for the lionfish,” said Bach. Willey notes that spearing a lionfish is one of the most rewarding, exhilarating, adrenaline-producing moments of diving because when “we remove lionfish we are helping the ecosystem and saving a lot of juvenile native fish.”

Two lionfish display their colorful spines. (photo by Robert Herb)

If programs like the one being run by the Roatan Marine Park are ultimately going to be successful, it’s through systematic cooperation between disparate groups among the many nations in the Caribbean. It’s only by working together, pooling resources, data, and best practices that anything resembling fundamental change will ever be fully realized.

“Below recreational [SCUBA diving depth] limits the reef is still filthy with lionfish,” Beasley said, speaking of his concern for what lionfish are doing at depth. He notes that they have been seen by subs at depths of one-thousand feet. “What are they eating at depth that will affect future fisheries? Are they eating the juvenile snapper, grouper, or even the tuna stocks?” Beasley asks before concluding that we cannot imagine the ecological disasters that await from the actions of the lionfish at depth.

There have been some ingenious and exciting trap systems, like the one designed by Dr. Steve Gittings, Chief Scientist of NOAA’s Marine Sanctuary System, made to use technology and behavior to target lionfish in deep water specifically while minimizing by-catch,. Having the commercial fleet on Roatan utilizing these kind of deep water traps “would be a natural fit between lobster seasons and keep those boats and fishermen busy year round,” said Beasley, who hopes to have one of Gittings’ traps on display at the Roatan International Lionfish Tournament in October to help educate locals on how the traps function.

“I dream of the day a local can spend a day hunting lionfish for a return of $6-$10 per pound,” Beasley said. He sees the tipping point coming “when the nutritional value is realized and we can provide a steady supply to market.”

Diver inspects the corral tree in Sandy Bay Area (Photo by Jennifer Keck).

Island Divers Plant Underwater Trees to Give Coral a Chance

Thankfully there are a group of passionate environmental scientists leading the charge to preserve, protect and defend the coral reefs of the Bay Islands. As Tripp Funderburk, who runs the coral restoration program at Subway Watersports in Turquoise Bay explains, “we had the worst bleaching event in the history of Roatan last year.” Jennifer Keck, who works as the Education and Research Coordinator for the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences (RIMS) at Anthony’s Key Resort in Sandy Bay says, “we can’t afford to have another bleaching event.”

Coral Restoration initiatives are a planned scientific response that, as Executive Director of the Roatan Marine Park, Francis Lean says, “give hope to the reef.” Both of the restoration programs in Turquoise Bay and Sandy Bay use the same coral trees, the same record keeping and naming conventions so they can work together and collaborate in the future.

A piece of staghorn coral used in the restoration program. (Photo by Jennifer Keck).

The coral restoration programs on Roatan revolve around coral tree nurseries. The nurseries are composed of big, 30 foot tall PVC pipes. Like an underwater Christmas tree fragments of two critically endangered species coral, staghorn and elkhorn, hang from thin filaments of wire attached to the thicker PVC branches. To harvest these fragments, they take 10% of viable, healthy specimens of staghorn and elkhorn coral, cut them into little pieces and try to preserve as much of the genetic diversity of these keystone species as possible.

Funderburk, who previously worked as policy director in for the Coral Restoration Foundation setting up restoration programs across the Caribbean says “I am convinced these are important corals. We can grow them and plant them and we can get better at it. I’ve seen it work in Bonaire, Curacao, Mustique and in the Florida Keys.”

Starting in early 2016, the Bay Islands Reef Restoration program installed ten coral trees in Turquoise Bay and another ten in Mahogany Bay. Once the fragments of coral have sufficiently grown, they are planted back onto the reef, tagged, and monitored at regular intervals. Since January, the program in Turquoise Bay has out-planted more than 260 corals onto the reef with a success rate of more than 92%. Funderburk says that the program relies on volunteers, using an “ecotourism” model that doesn’t depend on “government grants or charity,” but provides their guests with “unique opportunities to learn about coral.”

Tripp Funderburk talking to a group of students at Turquoise Bay Resort. (Photo by Robert Herb).

Renee Setter, who recently completed her PADI Dive Master internship at Turquoise Bay, explains what makes working on the restoration program so special, saying, “ it’s such a unique and fulfilling experience to be able to give back to the reef. It makes divers feel satisfied and rewarded knowing that they gave back to the beautiful underwater world.”

Keck, who oversees a coral restoration program with 24 coral trees with more than 2,000 corals on them agrees that, “the whole idea of citizen science is just growing. People want to be more useful. There has been so much interest among recreational divers.”

While the programs in Sandy Bay and Turquoise Bay have been successful, the ultimate goal as Keck understands it is to “get the techniques down so we can start another nursery in the West End/West Bay area that the Marine Park will manage that would allow local dive shops to get involved and engage the community and make everyone feel like they are contributing.”

Lean agrees that cooperation is critical, saying “communication between all projects is essential to improve the effectiveness of coral restoration.”

While these coral restoration programs are not a fix for the rising temperatures and acidity in the ocean, they do help point the way forward towards a better future. Funderburk stresses that we need to “do as much smart conservation as we can on a local level” with programs that are “effective but also educational.”

Keck also ultimately sounds a positive note, saying that, “We might not have the answer today, but we might next month. We have a seed bank in Norway. We need a coral bank and that’s sort of what these nurseries are becoming.”

A bulldozer clears land for another phase at the Czech Village.

Roatan offers a Peculiar type of Attraction to the Central European Nation

The center of the Czech community is located in the quaint “Czech Village” spread across the hillside of Jonesville Point. “12 years ago, there was nothing here — no internet, no cell phone. No Eldons, no Megamall. (…) There was just a small road, it was completely jungle,” says the project’s founder George Czerny. The village is full of small, modest, wooden homes surrounded by white-painted fences.

Iri Maska, the original Czech pioneer, build a brewery and this pirate ship replica.

Czerny credits Maska, for being the man who brought him to the island and being the inspiration for building a Czech community on Roatan. Maska, who first came to Roatan in 1999, was “the first Czech on the island,” and the “great freedom” he saw here brought ideas for the future. Maska built the first microbrewery on the island, an imposing castle-like structure at the entrance to Oak Ridge. “I tasted Salva Vida, Port Royal, Imperial – no one from Czech Republic will drink that,” said Maska.

In 2005, Maska started building another ambitious project — a full-sized replica of Henry Morgan’s pirate ship, the Black Pearl. It took more than four years to build and includes such details as “six fully functioning bronze cannons, handmade canvas, ropes, a metal-tipped anchor and sheathing impregnated by hot blood from oxen.” Offering family-friendly pirate shows onboard the massive, 27-meter vessel sailing out of Fantasy Island, the Black Pearl was a jewel on the east side of the island.

Like some kind of gold fever in the Wild West, all the people want to come here

The Czech dream had a few setbacks. The brewery has been boarded up due to what Maska characterizes as “the illegal business practices of Cerveceria Hondureña.” Even the Black Pearl is slowly sinking by the dock in Oak Ridge.

The new wave of Czech developers on Roatan see the future in housing developments.Czerny has been working to make Roatan a household name in Czechia.“The sea. There is no sea in Czech Republic,” explains Hana Albertová, a Czech who runs a tour business on Roatan talking about the Czech fascination with the Caribbean.

“Like some kind of gold fever in the Wild West, all the people want to come here,”says Czerny. There is a second phase of this development called the Czech Village Marina, which will add another twenty houses on a two acre site overlooking a fully-built dock inside a sheltered cove. The third and newest addition is 13 acreTerra Chulawith plans of 150 houses.Where there was once jungle, there are now rough roads and wide cleared spaces with only gumbo-limbo trees remaining sticking out from the exposed muddy ground.

As Sherri Vickers, a neighbor of the village in Jonesville Point who runs East End Property Management says, “The first time I saw it [Czech village] from the water, I thought it looked beautiful.” Over the years, she’s seen changes such that, “Now I feel there are too many homes crowded into the area there.”

Christine Henley Pilger, another neighbor, thinks that the Czech community has a positive impact on the area, saying “they are bringing value to the neighbors around them, including us.” And it looks like the Czechs will just keep on coming.

While the original Czech Village is modest, the new developments are vastly larger. Near Camp Bay there is another Czech community under construction with a lower section called Diamond Hill and an upper area called Sunny Hill.

Started five years ago, Diamond Hill is, like Terra Chula, an enormous project on more than forty acres of land. There are 25 completed houses with plans for up to 200 once finished.

There’s a new restaurant and plans for the on-site Czech Republic consulate. There are also plans for a marina, a beach area and a two-story Czech castle that’s going to be built on the top of the hill.