Spencer Phillips speared a 17 and a half inch lionfish off the Alabama coast, which appears to be a new state record, besting the old record by close to about a half inch.
Lionfish are not native to the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists believe lionfish, which are native to warm Pacific waters, escaped into the Atlantic from large aquariums inundated during Hurricane Andrew in 1992. A small handful of lionfish released during the storm quickly colonized the Atlantic Coast, with reports of isolated sightings coming in from the Carolinas and the Florida coast for several years. As early as 16 years ago, Herb Kumpf, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, predicted the species would spread throughout the Caribbean and into the northern Gulf of Mexico.
That has come to pass.
They showed up in the northern Gulf in 2010, a few weeks after the BP oil spill ended. Within a single week, lionfish were spotted off Pensacola, Mobile, and Louisiana.
Because lionfish are ambush predators and will not readily move to eat a baited hook, killing them remains a spearfishing only proposition. Most divers will tell you that it already seems impossible to control the invasion through spearing alone.
Phillips and his brother, Forrest, president of Southern Skin Divers Supply in Birmingham, were offshore doing some commercial spearfishing. The brothers have a commercial fishing license and harvest flounder, sheepshead and lionfish, among other quarry.
The pair also have a lionfish hunting team that has won several local lionfish tournaments. The tournaments are one of the best techniques so far developed for clearing lionfish from some dive sites. However, lionfish are here to stay, no matter how many divers shoot. They are too prolific and numerous, especially at depths beyond the reach of scuba divers.
The Phillips brothers and their team have been in the running for a state record for lionfish several times. Alex Fogg, a scientist with Florida Fish and Wildlife's marine division, is the official keeper of the lionfish records, separating them by state. Spearfishermen send lionfish they think might be a record to Fogg, who measures them and does research with the carcasses. One of the key things he is trying to understand is how quickly the invasive fish grow in the Gulf. This much is known, they are getting much larger here than they do in their native waters, where predators and other factors control the population.
"We have been contenders on the largest fish several times, and every time we send one in, we always get beat by like 2mm," said Forrest Phillips. "This time, we got one that I'm pretty confident that is going to be 4 or 5 mm larger than the Alabama record. We were 60 feet deep. I think 439 or something like that is the current Alabama lionfish record. I believe Spencer's is going to be about 445 when it is all said and done."
Fogg hasn't received Spencer Phillips' lionfish yet, but said it sounds like a new record. But only for the state.
"It's a big one, but not the biggest that's been caught. It's not going to beat the Florida record or the world record. The world record is just shy of 500 millimeters. That was in the Keys," Fogg said, talking about a fish that was over 19 inches long.
"Overall, they're getting bigger. The fish we have in the Gulf haven't been here that long. The fish we're seeing now are the larger, older individuals that we hadn't seen before," Fogg said. "Now that we are getting that older group, I think we are going to see larger and larger fish, and the records are going to get broken over and over."
Fogg and the Phillips brothers agree that there appear to be more lionfish off Florida than any other Gulf state, followed by Louisiana. Alabama has lionfish, but not nearly as many as you seen off Florida. I explored that question with Fogg a few years ago in an interview. Here's what he said:
"Off Alabama, there are so many artificial reefs, the lionfish may spread out more. Florida, you have a pyramid here, and then you don't have another one for a long way, so they may concentrate more," Fogg said. "You might see a few on a chicken coop off Alabama, but go a little east, and the same chicken coop can have 50 to 100 on it. Or it might be the loop current off of Alabama doesn't bring as many larvae to the reefs."
The Gulf's loop current runs north between the Yucatan peninsula and the western end of Cuba, then bends to the east, flowing between Cuba and Florida. The warm current carries jellyfish, sargassum and larval creatures from the Caribbean and distributes them throughout the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists speculate that the loop current may be the source for the sudden arrival of lionfish in the northern Gulf, where fish were sighted for the first time off of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle all within a week.
"It might also be the water temperatures in the winter. Those shallower reefs off Alabama, water temperatures get into the 50s in the winter. We didn't see any lionfish on those when it was cold, though they were there in the summer. We had to go out to deeper water and find 60 degree temperatures," Fogg said, explaining that deeper water is closer to shore in Florida, perhaps providing a thermal refuge to the fish. He said the temperature issue may also play a role in keeping the creatures from colonizing the inshore bays.