Marine Species: The Lionfish

 

What is a lionfish?

The red lionfish, pterois volitans, is native to the Indo-Pacific. The most common species have white and red/black/brown-striped patterns.  Their characteristic venomous dorsal spikes fan out like a mane, hence the name “lionfish.” There are 18 different known species, varying in size and pattern, such as the red lionfish and the spotfin lionfish. The biggest individuals reach up to 18 inches long (45 cm).  Most divers know that they’re highly venomous, packed with poison that can cause pain, swelling, sweating and respiratory distress. They are beautiful to behold, from a distance, however, and are typically not aggressive toward divers. They are nocturnal hunters and feed on a wide variety of small fish and crustaceans. During the day, they usually retreat on the reef or sit in nooks and crannies

Where do they live, and what is this “invasive species” thing all about?

The lionfish is native to and quite common on coral reefs all over the Indo-Pacific, from the coast of Eastern Africa to the South Pacific. In these areas, the population is not a problem.

However, likely due to human activity, lionfish have been haunting Atlantic and Caribbean reefs for around the last 20 years. Whether they originally arrived through accidental aquarium release or as part of a ship’s ballast water, the invasive population of lionfish has no predators in the region. Their population has thusly exploded to problematic levels from North Carolina all the way down to Bonaire, damaging and threatening local ecosystems.

These fish also have a high reproductive rate. They are sexually mature at one year old and can live up to 20 years. The situation in the Caribbean has led to lionfish culling in Florida, Honduras, Bonaire, the Bahamas, Mexico, Cayman and many other popular dive destinations. Here, divers can kill and remove lionfish from the local reefs to keep the population from growing. There are culling courses in some destinations for recreational divers, and in others only professional divers may cull the fish.

Where can I spot them?

Lionfish are not difficult to find. They are common in reefs all over the Indo-Pacific, as well as the Caribbean, unfortunately. Be careful around them, especially if they’re on the move. Although their venom will not kill you if you’re stung, it will cause intense localized pain, swelling, and possibly blistering. They are not particularly shy and make good photography subjects because of their spectacular fins.

 

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Imagine a Full Year of Pre-Made Promotions

IMAGINE A FULL CALENDAR YEAR OF PRE-MADE SALON PROMOTIONS FROM JANUARY THROUGH DECEMBER. 
Seasons and public holidays are at the heart of a successful salon marketing calendar. When done right, coordinated salon promotions can generate a steady flow of guests year round. A salon marketing plan is simply a well thought out plan of specials and promotions for your salon. Monthly promotions help keep clients and prospective customers aware of your salon, or “top of mind” and reminds or motivates guests to make an appointment. The best offers are those that add value without a lot of cost. 

We customize and execute everything -- including emails, social media posts, home page banners, landing pages, and in-store marketing materials such as posters, mirror talkers and bounce-back cards. We provide all content and graphics. And we do all this at a rate you can afford as a small business. We can do it at such an affordable price because BeautyMark Marketing has already done 95% of the marketing and creative work, leaving the remaining 5% for offer and branding customization.

Turn every promotion into a viral campaign to get more customers via word-of-mouth
- Social posting (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, G+)
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- Launch entire marketing campaigns as easy as 1-2-3. 
- Full marketing services at a fraction of the cost of agency prices

Why Are We Different From Other Marketing Services Providers? We are salon and beauty marketing specialists. We “get” beauty.

Everything Is Done For You: 
Instead of handling your salon marketing efforts in-house, let BeautyMark act as your marketing director. We will administer salon promotions across all digital platforms on your salon's behalf. Simply put, we rock!

Beauty Industry Expertise: 
Tired of having to educate your marketing agency on your beauty business? We are the salon industry specialists, our beauty business expertise allows us to mix business with pretty.

Compelling Offers: 
Our campaigns feature low-cost, value-added offers. BeautyMark implements a combination of strategic styles and promotional methods including: maximize calendar {both seasonal & holiday}, special packages, up-sell and cross-sell, add-on services, friend referrals, encourage gift card sales, limited-time offers, and bonus treatment offers.

Editorial-Design & Styling: 
Benefit from gorgeous editorial design and styling, modern graphics and type, and on-trend color palettes and themes.

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Our headline driven approach gets read and responded to. Tongue-in-cheek headlines, catchy tag lines and fresh service offerings give your promotion personality.

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Our campaigns feature premium photography with fresh, modern styling.

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Our promotions are the perfect match for attracting new clients, increasing visit frequency of current clients, and bringing back existing clients. It’s a triple hit threat.

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5} An overall boost in your salon marketing response rate.

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Laureates of the 2017 Women in News Editorial Leadership Award announced

WAN-IFRA has named an editor from Egypt and an editor from Kenya as Winners of the WAN-IFRA Women in News Editorial Leadership Award.

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Ocean Sanctuaries Offers Marine Citizen Science Projects

Established in 2014, Ocean Sanctuaries creates and supports marine citizen science projects for divers around the world. Citizen science, or community science, has gained ground as a discipline recently, providing accurate and reliable data. Ocean Sanctuaries, based in San Diego, offers divers a variety of marine citizen projects.

Sharks of California

“Sharks of California” is open to both snorkelers and scuba divers. Anyone in the water can photograph and upload pictures of sharks they encounter to a citizen-science tool called “FieldScope,” which allows users to gather and record data for almost any science. Ocean Sanctuaries has adapted this tool for monitoring sharks.

For example, a snorkeler or diver might spot a leopard shark off the coast of San Diego in shallow water. They can simply point their camera or GoPro at the shark to record a photograph or video sequence. This is called a verified encounter, because even if the photographer is unsure of the species, once they upload it to FieldScope, a shark expert can confirm the species. FieldScope maintains a database of all previously photographed sharks. Ocean Sanctuaries has photographs ranging from whale sharks to angel sharks to great whites in the database, all taken by citizen scientists. When uploading an image, the diver or snorkeler can indicate their location, either via GPS or Google Maps. This provides an idea of where they saw each species.

Ocean Sanctuaries, of course, does not expect a diver to place themselves at risk to collect shark data. Safety is the primary consideration around any marine animal, especially sharks.

Sevengill Shark Identification Project

Ocean Sanctuaries also offers the Sevengill Shark Identification Project.

The broadnose sevengill shark (Notorynchus cepedianus) is named for the seven gill slits on either side of its body, as opposed to a shark’s more common five gills. Sevengills can reach lengths of 5 to 10 feet (1.5 to 3 m), weigh up to 236 pounds (107 kg) and can live up to 49 years.

Although this shark has a wide range, from California to South Africa, to New Zealand, it is subject to intense fishing pressure because of its habitat in inshore waters. Currently, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) lists the sevengill shark as “Data Deficient,” with data lacking in most regions. This makes it difficult to determine the overall status of this species. The IUCN currently assesses it as “Near Threatened” in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

For this citizen science project, divers complete a normal dive, and if they observe a sevengill shark and can take a photograph of the lateral view of its head and gill area without endangering their (or the shark’s) safety, they do so. After the dive, they upload that photograph to the Wildbook database at Sevengill Shark Sightings for analysis.

An open-source software framework, Wildbook supports collaborative mark-recapture, molecular ecology, and social-ecology studies, especially where citizen-science data needs to be incorporated and managed.

Fig. 1: Areas to be scanned by pattern recognition algorithm in Wildbook

 

Within Wildbook are two pattern-recognition algorithms, which scan submitted photographs and analyze the black freckling pattern seen around the eyes and gill area of this species. This identifies individuals in much the same way as a human fingerprint. In this way, photographs submitted over time in a single location can determine if and which sharks are returning from year-to-year.

The project is currently accepting data from divers in California, South Africa and New Zealand and has successfully identified over two dozen individual sevengills in the San Diego area.

Yukon Marine Life Survey

In 2000, the City of San Diego and the San Diego Oceans Foundation (SDOF), purchased, cleaned and sank a 366-foot-long Canadian warship called the HMCS Yukon to create an artificial reef, which has been spectacularly successful. The Yukon attracts plentiful local marine life and is becoming a revenue-generating attraction for traveling divers from around the world.

When the project began, both SDOF and the local scientific community were curious to understand the effects of an artificial reef on local fish populations and surrounding marine life. SDOF and Dr. Ed Parnell of Scripps Institution of Oceanography undertook a joint study and released the results in 2004. Data gathered by local citizen science divers was crucial to the study to generate a baseline of marine life species on the ship.

In 2015, Ocean Sanctuaries decided to use citizen science divers once again to gather data on the Yukon as a follow-up to the original 2004 survey. Divers monitor and record the marine life, both sessile (attached invertebrates) as well as fish, that has migrated onto the wreck since then.

Fig. 2: Giant plumose anemones and red gorgonian sea fans on the Yukon.
Photo credit: Michael Bear

 

Again, divers simply complete a normal dive on the wreck and take photographs of marine life they encounter. After the dive, they submit their images to the Ocean Sanctuaries database to create a species inventory over time. Since the Yukon lies in 100 feet of water, it is an advanced dive. No diver should exceed their level of training to collect data on the ship, nor should they penetrate the wreck to gather data.

The current Yukon Marine Life Survey will last at least five years. Once completed, the data will inform scientists of marine-life changes on the ship, enabling California coastal managers to evaluate the impact of artificial reefs on local marine species. See the KPBS Special that was done in 2016 by KPBS reporter Erik Anderson on this project and learn more about it here.

Later in 2017, Ocean Sanctuaries will offer a Marine Citizen Scientist certification course for both divers and non-divers in conjunction with REEF. For more information on the citizen science projects currently offered by Ocean Sanctuaries, check here.

By guest author Michael Bear, Citizen Science Project Director, Ocean Sanctuaries

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Awakening the ghosts of 1995 – The year we gave up

A pivotal year in the history of journalism, 1995 marked the industry’s failure to embrace the digital dawn. In tracing an arc from hot metal to audience-first, guest author Steve Foley here examines journalism’s contemporary challenges – and their precedents – in the hope of understanding what has imperilled journalism itself.

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Five Top Shark Charities

Dedicated organizations, from worldwide charities to smaller community-based initiatives, offer opportunities to become involved in marine conservation. Here are our picks for five top shark charities that are working not only to preserve our oceans but also to protect their apex predators.

Friends for Sharks

Two great white shark wildlife dive guides [full disclosure: the author is one of the co-founders] began Friends for Sharks  after a serious back injury unexpectedly ended one of their marine conservation careers. Looking for a new way to channel their passion and skills for positive change, they created this self-funded initiative. Their mission is to increase worldwide awareness of the threats to sharks while educating people of all ages and from all social backgrounds. They hope to inspire others to “be the change they wish to see in the world.” They completed the World Tour for Sharks in 2015, including 87 shark-conservation events in eight countries, presented to more than 7,000 people. To support Friends for Sharks, you can book a talk, a lecture series or virtual classroom event within your own community or at local marine-conservation projects. Find more information on their website.

The Shark Trust

Founded in the U.K. in 1997, The Shark Trust is a well-known charity dedicated shark, skate and ray conservation in the U.K. and internationally. Their vision is “a future where sharks, skates and rays thrive within a globally healthy marine ecosystem,” and they work closely with the U.K. government and international partners to achieve this. The Trust heavily influenced the ban on European shark finning in 2013. It’s also part of a global partnership that introduced the 10-year Global Shark and Ray Initiative in 2016 to drastically improve the conservation status of sharks. The Trust works closely with fishing industries, businesses, divers and the public to create change and educate communities. Support their work by becoming a member, adopting a white shark to fund research in the Farallon Islands, donating, fundraising or volunteering at their community events.

Fin Fighters

Fin Fighters, a U.K. shark-conservation organization, wants to end the sale and distribution of shark fins in the U.K. by 2023. They aim to create “a growing movement of ordinary people working together to make a difference.” They are currently running campaigns that include a Citizen Shark Science Project, which trains volunteers to conduct research work, as well as an “Ocean Optimism” series of documentaries and podcasts.

The “What’s Beneath the Batter” campaign aims to uncover the sale of vulnerable shark species in fish and chips, and their 2016 Sharkfest, the first festival of its kind in the U.K., was a great success. Fin Fighters work closely with volunteers and campaign ambassadors, both in the field and virtually via home-based roles. To get involved or attend Sharkfest in 2017, find more information on their website.

Gills Club

The Gills Club, with their motto “Smart About Sharks,” gives girls the opportunity to get involved in projects that make a difference in public perception of sharks. Members, aged 13 and younger, receive tools in monthly newsletters to help educate their communities about sharks. There are also hands-on learning experiences at monthly events in Massachusetts and Florida. The club aims to encourage young girls’ interest in science and math subjects, and works closely with educational institutions. The newsletter features the work of top female shark researchers from around the world, information about different shark species, and provides research updates. Find information about joining the Gills Club and supporting their work on their website.

Shark Spotters 

Shark Spotters is a pioneering shark safety program in Cape Town, South Africa that focuses on solutions to shark-human conflicts. The program has received international attention for its unique approach to reducing negative interactions between sharks and people using non-lethal methods. Shark spotters improve beach safety by monitoring coastlines for nearby sharks. A flag system indicates current water visibility and shark-sighting data for water-users. Spotters also provide emergency assistance during shark incidents, contribute to shark research, educate the public about shark conservation, and provide employment for local people. Private donations and sponsors such as Save Our Seas Foundation  fund the program. Those wishing to donate and support Shark Spotters can find further information on their website.

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