Scourge of the Lionfish - Preview

Lionfish are beautiful, colorful reef fish found throughout the Indian and Pacific oceans — that’s the good news. The bad news is they’re now found all over the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic coasts of North and South America as well. Alien to those waters, lionfish are the perfect invasive species — aggressive, without predators, prolific breeders and tolerant of a wide range of conditions.

In the rich fishing grounds of New England and Canada, it seemed as if cod would never run out — until they did. Fishing communities from Newfoundland to Massachusetts fell apart. Widespread closures in the 1990s aimed to let the cod recover, but it’s been a long wait. Carl Safina goes fishing to find some of the first signs that the famous codfish just might, indeed, be coming back.

After local leaders launched a crusade to end the slaughter of Trinidad’s thousand-pound leatherback turtles, the turtles were transformed from shark bait to tourist attraction. Now Trinidad’s beaches support 80 percent of the entire Caribbean’s leatherbacks and nearby villages make a great living catering to the visitors.