Thousands of Lionfish Are Dying With Mysterious Ulcers — And Bald Eagles Are Eating What's Left

Thousands of Lionfish Are Dying With Mysterious Ulcers — And Bald Eagles Are Eating What's Left #lionfish #invasivespecies #floridakeys #marinedocumentary #naturefindsaway For twenty years, lionfish defeated every removal program the Atlantic could throw at them. Then their bodies started showing up covered in ulcers — and bald eagles started picking them off the surface. This is the story of the most efficient invasive predator the western Atlantic has ever seen, and the strange, unplanned convergence of pressures that, after two decades of losing, finally has the math moving the other direction. In March, a Key Largo dive operator named Carla Mendez surfaced from a routine dive and counted three lionfish on a ledge that had held forty animals two years earlier. Four of the five fish she found that day had open sores along their flanks. She emailed the photos to a marine biologist at Florida International University. The reply was a question nobody in the lionfish removal community had thought to ask out loud: how many of the lionfish you're seeing have those marks? What Dr. Anita Brooks and her team documented over the next six weeks was the first wide-area outbreak of a skin ulcer disease running through wild lionfish populations across the Florida Keys. The leading hypothesis points to a bacterial pathogen — possibly in the Mycobacterium group — finding a dense, immunologically naive host population to spread through. A species that had defeated every spearfisher, every "eat them" campaign, and every Caribbean shark-training experiment had finally encountered an enemy it could not see and could not outrun. But the disease was only the first thing that had changed. At the same time, dive boat captains across the Florida Keys started noticing something unprecedented at the surface near their marinas. A large bird, hunting the shallows where dying lionfish drift to the top. A bald eagle — the same species American conservation nearly lost in the twentieth century, now recovered, now hunting an invader that did not exist when the eagle population originally collapsed. This documentary tracks three converging pressures: the disease, the eagles, and the native reef predator complex — Nassau grouper, Goliath grouper, moray eels — that is, quietly and across thousands of square miles of reef, returning to its job. If you dive or fish the Florida reefs, the Keys, or anywhere in the Caribbean basin, I want to hear from you. Have you seen lionfish in the last year? Are you seeing fewer of them than you did two or three years ago? Tell me which reef. Tell me what depth. Tell me what you are seeing. The divers know this water before any government report does. ================================= 👉 What do you think of this video? Share your thoughts in the comments, hit the like button, and subscribe to Agriculture Flow for more eye-opening documentaries about farming, livestock, and agricultural technology. All footage belongs to its respective owners and is used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976 (Fair Use). #agricultureflow #agriculture #farming #animal processing #farmdocumentary #processing #slaughterhouseprocess