Abstract

During the early 2000s, Pacific Red Lionfish (Pterois volitans) and Devil Firefish (P. miles) spread rapidly throughout the greater Caribbean region. In 2004, invasive lionfish reached the Bahamas, where local populations grew exponentially (Claydon et al. 2008, Albins and Hixon 2013), reaching levels of about 400 lionfish per ha on continuous reef (Green and Côté 2009) and a phenomenal 8 lionfish per m2 on patch reefs (Benkwitt 2013). This rapid increase in the population size of the invader was accompanied by extreme declines in the abundance of small native reefs fishes (Albins and Hixon 2008, Green et al. 2012, Albins 2013, 2015, Benkwitt 2015, Ingeman and Webster 2015). A voracious predator of small fish, invasive lionfish were rapidly converting native fish biomass to lionfish biomass. By about 2009, there was evidence that lionfish populations in the Bahamas were starting to level-off (Green et al. 2012), followed by anecdotal reports of population declines Having studied lionfish since their first appearance in 2005 in the Exuma Cays chain of the central Bahamas near Lee Stocking Island, we examined our fish survey data from 2005 through 2015 to determine patterns of lionfish abundance over the first decade of the invasion.

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