There are aquarium owners who have reported having a lionfish live to 20 years old. (To put it another way: Lionfish breed faster than rabbits and most of them find good homes with plenty of food.) Lionfish are sexually mature reach 1 year of age and can live well beyond 15 years. Lionfish larvae have an incredibly high “recruitment rate” to suitable habitat, meaning that potentially more eggs become larvae, which then become juvenile lionfish settled somewhere that they can grow and live relatively free from environmental pressure. In favorable conditions female lionfish can release egg masses approximately every 4 days, up to 2 million eggs a year. Lionfish are potentially the fastest breeders in the Western Atlantic Basin. The consequences impact the food security and economies affecting over a hundred million people. Invasive lionfish are out-breeding, out-competing and out-living native fish stocks and other marine species. One thing is for certain, the lionfish invasion is probably the worst man-made ecological disaster ever witnessed and it has yet to completely play itself out. We discuss in detail specific facts about lionfish in other pages of our website but to give you a simple summary of the problem: The world is still waiting to see how bad the problem with non-native lionfish in the Mediterranean is going to get it is a relatively “new” invasion that is only just really beginning to develop. Non-native lionfish are a terrible problem in the Western Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea and in the Gulf of Mexico, however they are not a problem in their native ranges of the Indian Ocean, Southern and Western Pacific Ocean and in the Red Sea. Why are lionfish considered such a problem? Are lionfish really all that bad?
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