Non-native Lionfish invade the Atlantic

Revisiting the Lionfish documentary shoot 07/28/2006

Life aboard a ship at sea is dictated by unfamiliar parameters.

There are strictly adhered-to boat deployments and dive times. Emails come and go twice a day. There's a dress code (no flip flops; no tank tops in the mess hall). And the most precisely planned and regimented things are meal times, by which everything else is planned. They are chiseled in stone.

With all of this under our belts, we tackle Day 2.

Curtis Callaway [cinematographer] films the early morning (0630) plankton tow: a search for lionfish larvae; while Norb Wu [cinematographer] readies for the first dive of the morning (0730) - a survey of lionfish on one of the earlier identified research sites - along with a side by side comparison of HD (high definition) vs. SD (standard definition) footage. He likens his assignment to "jumping off a two-story building with 600 pounds of equipment."

Throughout the morning the wind picks up, to a rip roaring 25k. Great for sailing; not so for retrieving divers and dinghies. The afternoon dive is abandoned and instead R/V Nancy Foster undertakes more multi-beaming exercises, utilizing the state-of-the-art equipment upgraded this past winter.

Multi-beaming is a form of echolocation which uses a 'fan' of beams to map the ocean floor. Out here, Paula Whitfield [NOAA Chief Scientist] is looking for the kind of hard bottoms and structure the lionfish like to hang out on, for further studies. Everything we do is oriented toward finding out the most information possible about this fish: where it lives, what it eats, how it reproduces, whether it is thriving ... and tomorrow, we just may even find out how it tastes.