Divers are gathering on St. Thomas and St. John Saturday to slay as many lionfish as they can and compete for $8,000 in prize money during the second annual STTJ Lionfish Derby.
Captains of the participating boats must attend a registration meeting Friday at 6 p.m. at the Virgin Islands Game Fishing Club in Red Hook on St. Thomas. Participants may also register in advance online at the Caribbean Restoration and Education Foundation website, better known as CORE V.I.
On Saturday, boats with divers will head out to the waters around St. Thomas and St. John in an attempt to win prizes for catching the most lionfish, as well as for snagging the biggest and the smallest lionfish. Boats may go anywhere they like, according to CORE President Frank Cummings, but only those divers who have been certified and permitted to cull lionfish in the Virgin Islands National Park will be allowed to hunt in park waters. Other restrictions will be outlined at the Friday night meeting.
The event is being sponsored by CORE V.I., the Department of Planning and Natural Resources’ Division of Fish and Wildlife, and Reef Responsible. The entry fee is $50 per person.
Invasive voracious lionfish were first identified in Virgin Islands’ waters in 2008. According to a 2015 story in the Source, “at least 40 species of fish in the Atlantic have declined in population since the appearance of the lionfish.” There are additional consequences beyond simply eating up our local fishes, according to experts; many of the species they eat graze on algae that grow on reefs, and “left unchecked, algae can smother reef systems.”
As the major threat to local reefs, lionfish became the center of CORE’s work until the onset of Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease in 2019. “Because of the rapid rate of mortality with the disease, we took our foot off the gas for lionfish,” said Cummings.
But now it seems the lionfish population is roaring back. Michael Funk, vice president of CORE’s executive board, has been organizing boats on St. Croix to go out once or twice a month to hunt for lionfish, and the data from that island are showing a consistent trend, said Cummings.
“For a while, they were getting only 10 or 15 lionfish during an outing,” said Cummings, “but in the last month they’ve been getting close to one hundred.”
At a lionfish derby held on St. Croix in May, 483 lionfish were culled from the waters.
It’s not clear why the lionfish population has surged. Cummings thinks lionfish breed in the depths of the South Drop between St. Croix and St. John. “They’re down about 300 feet or more, too deep for recreational divers to go [to hunt them] without special certification and gear,” he said.
A single female lionfish releases into the current up to two million eggs a year, which then float up to the surface. Driven by the wind, the eggs settle along the shoreline on St. John from Ram Head to Rendezvous Bay, leading to the recent population boom.
Cummings doesn’t have the data to prove it yet, but he thinks the invasion of sargassum seaweed also plays a part in the recent lionfish resurgence. “Sargassum acts like a broom, sweeping the eggs toward the shoreline. When we get an influx of sargassum, a month later we often get an increase in small lionfish,” he said.
New technology is being developed to hunt lionfish in deeper waters, according to Cummings. “Robotics can go down there, and with AI, they are becoming autonomous and can kill lionfish by administering a shock or a spear.”
In the meantime, CORE continues to train and certify divers to hunt lionfish. The next training on St. Thomas will be announced soon.
CORE Continues Its Mission to Educate Public and Restore Reefs
CORE’s mission includes education, and this past year, they partnered with Low Key Watersports to certify eight students from the Gifft Hill School on St. John. Those students then worked with CORE to maintain an underwater coral nursery in Leinster Bay.
“The underwater nursery is a great tool for education, and the students have been doing real work there,” said Cummings. The corals at the nursery are “fragments of opportunity” – pieces of coral that have been broken off by wave action or anchor damage and brought to the nursery by CORE divers. “Right now the fragments are happy and alive,” said Cummings.
As the summer sun heats water temperatures to a point beyond which corals can survive, CORE divers plan to install a shade structure in the nursery as they have in the past.
Some fragments are especially precious. One piece of staghorn coral found at Henley Cay is thriving, while the “mother grove” died off during the intense bleaching event in 2024. “We’re trying to preserve the last of some genomes,” Cummings said.
Throughout the Caribbean, scientists are trying to grow and preserve coral in land-based labs, but Cummings said CORE is now trying another approach on St. John.
He said a recent NOAA study showed that it was sometimes more effective to stabilize “fragments of opportunity” by cementing the coral pieces to a place in the reef structure close to where they’re found. This is in contrast to a common practice whereby divers bring the fragments back to a lab, stabilize them, and then take the fragments back out to the reef to replant.
“It’s 80% more efficient to put them right back where they came from where they have the right conditions for growth,” said Cumming. Now CORE has two teams of divers on St. John who travel with special cement that works underwater. “It takes a lot of training to do this,” he said. “You’ve got to blow a lot of bubbles before you get comfortable.”
