Here Come the Lionfish

It is a hot, still morning in Perdika, a small fishing village on Aegina, an island close to Athens, Greece. Cicadas thrum in the trees, and a small fishing boat chugs out of the marina, leaving a long, silver wake across the bay. On the point beyond the village, just below the church of Saint Sostis, we lay out our gear: scuba tanks, fins, masks, and breathing apparatuses, a couple of knives for cutting tangled fishing lines. My friend Konstantinos, the local divemaster, helps me into my wetsuit—even here, in summer, it gets cold twenty meters below—and we pick our way carefully down to the water. The beach is rocky, and much used since ancient times: the seabed is littered with old moorings, sunken buoys, broken amphorae alongside shredded tires. We paddle out over the shallows, dip beneath the waters, and begin our descent through clouds of damselfish, wrasse, and bream.

The seafloor around the point falls abruptly from five to over fifty meters, providing an excellent opportunity for a drift dive: a gentle coasting along the cliff, with the silver surface glittering above us, and deep blue-black waters below. As we descend and start to swim along the escarpment, we meet sponges, starfish, and—a particular joy—a brightly patterned, horned, and almost neon nudibranch, fumbling its way along a ledge. I am mostly on the lookout for cuttlefish and octopuses, those inquisitive and most intelligent beings, who I am just beginning to get to know and learn to interact with. And then Konstantinos raps on his tank to get our attention, points, and steeples his fingers into a hedgehog-like shape to alert and warn us: lionfish ahead.

There are three of them: ranging in size from a tennis ball to a football, and striped in deepening shades of orange, red, and almost black. Their long, flagged spines and sail-like fins ripple gently in the current. Their spines are venomous, and we are a little nervous around them, but they are also very, very beautiful, and seeing them evokes complex feelings of fear and awe. They do not belong here; but then, neither do I.

I arrived on Aegina only three years ago—around the same time, it turns out, as the lionfish. My partner and I were living in Athens and, pregnant with our first child, we were looking for somewhere quiet to spend the first months of parenthood. We rented a little place on the island, intending to visit on weekends, and then Covid happened. By the time the lockdowns lifted, we had a baby, and we lived here. Slowly, we got to know the island, its beaches and high places, the rhythms of summer tourism and winter agriculture, its paths, people, and peculiarities. One day, I realized I could dive here, something I had not done for almost a decade and only once in the Mediterranean, and a whole new aspect of the island opened up: the lower slopes of the mountain, where it fell away beneath the sea, peopled with a whole new range of inhabitants.

I still remember my first dive here: we walked into the water off a sandy beach on the southwest coast, skimming along just a few meters deep, and within a few minutes we were surrounded by a vast silver torus of small fry: a shimmering halo which seemed to be a welcome back to the ocean. I had been a little nervous to dive again after so long, but the feeling disappeared instantly to be replaced by calm and wonder. As clumsy as we are beneath the waves, with our tanks and suits and rasping respirators, this is our world too, with which we are inextricably entangled. Every time I come back from a dive and listen to the ocean roll around my head for hours afterwards, I am reminded that we are walking waterskins, and are still, four hundred million years after emerging, as salty as the sea itself.

On my second dive, I met a lionfish. This was not the first time I had done so: I remembered their prickly, languorous form from a reef three thousand miles to the south, some twenty years ago, off the west coast of Africa. But I did not expect to meet them here, in the northwest corner of the Aegean, in a deep gulf of a different ocean.

Konstantinos told me then that he had only seen them for the first time the previous year, the year I, too, first came to Aegina. They have since exploded in numbers. Last year we saw young and old fish together for the first time; this year they are almost uncountable, appearing in every shade and at every scale, at every site we visit. The story of how they got here, where we meet, and how we choose to live together has come to encapsulate for me the history of our present moment, and the choices we face in an uncertain future.

The weathered white limestone cliffs and red soils of Aegina and much of the Mediterranean formed more than two hundred and fifty million years ago, on the floor of an ocean ancient almost beyond imagination. This ocean was named Tethys, after the Titan of Greek mythology, daughter of Uranus and Gaia, consort of Oceanus, and mother to all the waters of the world. It connected what are now the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and was fringed by the tectonic plates of Africa, Eurasia, and Arabia.

Infinitesimally and over millennia these plates drifted towards one another, until they collided in the area of modern Iraq, some fifteen to twenty million years ago, creating the modern Mediterranean, and cutting it off from the Indian Ocean. Stranded on either side of this divide were marine species which had evolved together but which would now pursue their own, separate evolutionary adventures, creating two wonderfully diverse but entirely disconnected biospheres. This state persisted for almost all of those twenty million years, until, in fact—and quite precisely—the 18th of August 1869 with the cutting of the Suez Canal.

The construction of the Suez Canal was primarily a colonial and imperial enterprise. In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte gave instructions that the isthmus of Suez should be “cut through” to assure “the free and exclusive possession of the Red Sea to the French Republic.” In 1854, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the former French consul in Cairo and close friend of Egypt’s ruler, Saʿīd Pasha, obtained a license to construct the canal: he led the effort through to its completion. Hundreds of thousands of forced laborers were used to dig the channel; tens of thousands of them died in the effort. The canal immediately stimulated global trade, accelerated the colonization of Africa and southeast Asia, and unsettled the international order. The British invaded in 1882 and assumed de facto control of the canal zone until it was nationalized by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956, triggering the Suez Crisis. Today, some twelve percent of total global trade passes through the canal, including around ten percent of the world’s oil.

Container ships and crude oil are not the only things which pass through the canal. The opening of a passage between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean also permitted the flow of nonhuman mariners, for the first time since the Pleistocene. In 1876, less than a decade after the canal opened, the first nonhuman Indian Ocean native, a mussel known as Brachidontes pharaonis, was found west of Suez, in the waters off Port Said, where the canal empties into the Mediterranean. Since then, hundreds of species have made the same journey. Together, these travelers of the newly incised isthmus are known, after the architect of the canal, as Lessepsian migrants.

The first lionfish found in the Mediterranean was caught by a fisherman off the coast of Israel in 1991, but they only began to appear in large numbers in 2012. Over the following years, the lionfish have spread up the coast of the Levant, across the Mediterranean, into the Aegean and Adriatic Seas, and as far west, at least, as Sicily. They show no signs of stopping there and are expected to keep spawning and swimming and exploring this new habitat until they join up with their cousins in the Atlantic. The full impact of their arrival and explosion is not yet known, but it is feared that, like fellow migrant goatfish and rabbitfish before them, they will outcompete and potentially eradicate local fish, many of which are crucial to both marine ecosystems and human livelihoods as we have known them for centuries.

These lionfish are known to science as Pterois miles, from the Latin for “soldier.” They were first named as such by John Whitchurch Bennett, a British naturalist and former Royal Marine who collected specimens of what the locals called “devil firefish” off the coast of Sri Lanka in 1828 (it has been speculated that their color reminded Bennett of the red tunics of British soldiers). They have been found across the Indian Ocean, from South Africa to Indonesia, and now they are in the Mediterranean, thanks to the Suez Canal, and to climate change.

In the early decades of the canal, which passes through two drowned valleys today known as the Bitter Lakes, the water was too salty to permit all but the hardiest molluscs to transit, but over the last century much of this salt has been washed away. Another vast engineering operation, the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, reduced the flow of freshwater into the Mediterranean, making it saltier and more similar to conditions in the Red Sea. In 2015, the Egyptian government finished a decades-long program to widen the canal, accelerating its flow. These multiple feats of engineering are complemented by humanity’s greatest terraforming operation, the complex set of catastrophes known as climate change, which is warming the Mediterranean and making it even more hospitable to Lessepsian migrants from the south and east.

Coming face to face with the lionfish in the warming waters of the central Aegean is a reminder that the present ecological catastrophe is also a catastrophe of colonialism, one which has been unfolding for centuries. The lionfish is a climate migrant; it is also a subject—like me, like you—of the machinations of Empire and Capital. To adapt Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s resonant analysis: they are here because we were there.

This entanglement of lionfish expansion with human culture has another expression in the United States, where lionfish have also appeared, and exploded in number. Here, the vector of their arrival was not industrial colonialism, but industrial leisure. From their first appearance off Miami in 1985, the result of aquarium pets being dumped into local waterways, lionfish have spread up and down the east coast, reaching New York by 2001 and covering the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean in the 2010s. They thrive particularly on man-made reefs created for recreational diving.

The reaction has been swift, and unforgiving. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the lionfish are invaders, and should be treated as such. A good example of the prevailing attitude can be found on the Emerald Coast of Florida, which hosts an annual lionfish hunting tournament. During the competition, teams compete to spear as many lionfish as possible: in 2023, a total of 24,699 were “removed” over a long weekend. As one participant put it to the New Yorker, “What you’re hunting isn’t prey—it’s the enemy.”

In Florida and elsewhere, lionfish have been added to restaurant menus, roasted whole or bathed in broths and curries. Since 2016, they have been available from select Whole Foods, advertised as both delicious and morally good, with “firm, white flesh that is slightly buttery in taste,” and environmentally beneficial to boot.

The same suggestion is being made in Mediterranean waters, with a number of marine NGOs promoting lionfish gastronomy and training both fishermen and chefs in how to catch and prepare them. Tavernas on the Greek islands are following the American lead; in the port of Larnaca, in Cyprus, a poster depicting a lionfish reads, Western-style: “WANTED: Dead or Fried.”

My partner and I first came to Greece eight years ago; my partner had an exhibition in Athens, and we expected only to stay for a few weeks—we are still here. One of the first things we had to do to extend our stay was register with the foreigners’ department of the Police. This process occurs at a large, dedicated facility in an industrial area of Athens. Like most bureaucratic processes in Greece, it involves turning up at dawn, long before the office opens, in order to try and be towards the front of the queue. When the office opens, the queue moves inside, where it usually remains static for a few more hours while its component parts are slowly processed.

At the foreigners’ office, there are two queues: one for European citizens, one for everyone else. Our queue was almost all white; when a European citizen with darker skin attempted to join it, a guard yelled at them that they were in the wrong line.

This was 2015, the height of the so-called “European migrant crisis,” when over a million people came to the continent to request asylum; the most in a single year since the Second World War. Alongside our own work as artists, we spent some of that first year helping—in a very small way—to make spaces for these newly arrived peoples, in squats in Athens and informal camps on the islands, as they attempted to navigate borders, border guards, anti-migrant policies, and racist politicians on their way to some kind of different, perhaps better, life.

There is a relationship, and always has been, between the way we treat other people and the way we treat other creatures. I don’t want to eat the lionfish, because I am vegan, but also because I don’t want to eradicate another species, another community, just because I think it’s in the wrong place. Moreover, who are we to determine who belongs where when the conditions which make life habitable in any particular place are continually changing—and have been for billions of years?

Thirteen thousand years ago, the Saronic Gulf, which surrounds Aegina today, did not exist. Sea levels in the Mediterranean and the Aegean Seas were much lower, and what today is open ocean was then a series of small lakes, dominated by a broad bridge of land connecting the Peloponnese to the Attic plain.

As polar ice sheets thawed at the end of the last ice age, the waters slowly rose, gaining some seventy meters in height and washing over parts of the land bridge, rushing into the lakes and swelling them, and overwhelming the low-lying plain. One after another, the peaks of the land bridge were turned into islands: Aegina, the highest point in the gulf, as well as Salamina, Agistri, Poros, and a number of smaller islets.

In Greek mythology, as recorded in the Theogony of Hesiod and elsewhere, the names of these islands are also nymphs, and they are known as the daughters of Asopos, which is the name of a major river in Attica, which still flows into the Saronic Gulf today. However long ago, someone, some peoples, witnessed the sea level rise, watched as these islands came into being, and made stories about them. These myths, written down only two or three thousand years ago, are not mere fables: they are, in part, a record of geological and climatic events in deep time, which, over millennia, altered human life and our relationship with the Earth.

We can only guess at who these witnesses were: their ancestors were certainly migrants from western Anatolia, their descendants continued to spread throughout Europe over the next several millennia. The Saronic Gulf has always been a hotspot for migration: in the last hundred years, over a tenth of the thousand new species arriving in the Mediterranean have been found here. These migrants have arrived by various means: on the hulls or in the ballast tanks of ships, and as parasites in and around commercial fish farms, as well as by their own transiting of the Suez Canal.

In each case, humans have created the conditions for their arrival and their settlement: not merely by opening transit routes, but by altering ecosystems in ways which drive some species out, and invite new ones in. These new arrivals are called, in the more recent scientific literature, “non-indigenous species,” or NIS; they are called “invasive” when, like the lionfish, they have not merely established a self-sustaining population, but are spreading rapidly.

It’s noticeable, when you read the scientific literature, that many authors take great care over their language: that there is an unspoken fear of slippage between terminologies, of contamination, perhaps, between discussions of human and nonhuman migrants. Such fear is understandable: the language used around human migration is heavily politicized, and when those in the media and politics want to disparage migrants, the first step is to “dehumanize” them; to equate them with nonhumans in ways intended to inspire fear and disgust.

But the history of science itself is based on this kind of exclusion as well, on the enforcement of rigid divisions between the human and the nonhuman. It is based on human superiority, and human exceptionalism, and it is precisely that sense of superiority and exceptionalism which has produced the world in which we find ourselves today: a world in which the living Earth is treated as a resource for (over-)extraction, in which other species can be killed at will—in which they simply do not count.

Scientific discourse—any discussion—which treats the struggles of nonhuman migration as something separate from the wider political situation repeats and reinforces a worldview which has produced not only the climate and biodiversity crisis, but also racism and social injustice. The history of climate change is part of the history of colonialism and imperialism: it’s part of the same impetus to control and dominate others. Speciesism is downstream of racism: we are capable of treating the Earth in this way because we are capable of treating each other this way. And thus, any change in our relationship with the Earth involves and is predicated upon a change in our relationships to one another. Perhaps that is what the lionfish have come to teach us.

We all belong not just to our present moment, nor to the place in which we find ourselves at that moment, but to a far greater system of changes which have occurred throughout Earth’s history and will continue to occur long into the future. The present convulsions of the planet are the result of the whole Earth system trying, in response to terrible pressures, to shift itself, often violently, into a new set of alignments, and we are part of those changes. We are the weather, and the water; we are the lionfish, too, changing our environment as we are changed by it. This realization can be humbling, and it can be hopeful too. We belong to the whole timescale of history.

I keep looking through the literature to find records of what happens after an “invasion,” what terrible havoc is wreaked by these newcomers. But I don’t, I haven’t found that record. “Ironically,” notes one paper, surveying the evidence on Lessepsian migrants, “the Mediterranean may be returning to the pre-Messinian situation of millions of years ago, when the marine life was in balance.”

Later, the same author notes, for the purpose of clarity: “There is no record of total replacement of an indigenous species by a Lessepsian migrant. Outcompeted local species would experience a vertical habitat displacement by usually maintaining themselves in deeper and cooler waters. So far, no misplacement has been yet reported, which clearly indicates the under-exploitation of niches in the eastern Mediterranean communities.” The sea is vast, the ocean wide; change, violent or otherwise, happens. There is no record of one species driving another to extinction, except in the human case.

This is not a new idea: in A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, Aldo Leopold wrote about cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), a non-indigenous species which flowed into America from Europe, following the ploughing and subsequent overgrazing of the prairies. While cheatgrass increased the risk of fire and reduced forage for wild and domesticated animals alike, Leopold also noted that it reduced the erosion which would otherwise have followed the overgrazing that cleared the way for it. Even Charles Elton, considered one of the founders of the study of “invasive species,” wrote in 1930: “The balance of nature does not exist and perhaps never has existed.”

In his book The New Wild, from 2015, environmental writer Fred Pearce documents numerous examples of non-indigenous species participating in new ecologies in complex ways. In China, the invasive water hyacinth, deliberately introduced to absorb heavy metals in waterways, ran out of control as a result of runway pollution. Chinese scientists doubled down and used the weed to produce biogas and organic fertilizer, cleaning the lakes and rivers and supplanting the upstream pollutants at the same time. In the Mediterranean of the 1990s, ecologists warned that an invasive algae, Caulerpa, was killing off seagrass meadows, but it turned out that it was feeding on the incredibly high pollution of the time. As the pollution receded, not least due to the action of the algae itself, so did the invader’s footprint. “The more damage that humans do to nature—” wrote Pearce, “through climate change, pollution, and grabbing land for intensive agriculture and plantation forestry—the more important alien species and novel ecosystems will be to ensuring nature’s survival.”

In the guided meditation exercises of the Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, which take us through all four billion years of the existence of life on Earth, beginning with the first conflagration that still unfolds within our mitochondria through the entire evolutionary line from protoplasmic cells to Homo sapiens, my favorite moment is always the fishy one, when she exhorts us to feel our spines flex, to feel our long bodies slip through the cool water, to feel like we are floating and flying at the same time in a community of fellows thousands strong.

I don’t know, perhaps it’s because I’ve never felt comfortable in my home country either, not in my school or social class, not in my gender, not even, one hundred percent, in my species, that I feel a kind of kinship with the lionfish. Nothing could be more alien to me: rubber-suited, breathing canned air, clad in clunky mask and boots, underwater, ten thousand miles from where I was born—and yet: hello!

It is through deep time that I find my way to the lionfish. It is only seventy-five million years since the evolutionary split that separated primates from rodents; eighty-five since we parted ways with the hedgehogs and the even-toed ungulates. It’s three hundred and twenty million years since the development of the amniotic membranes, which we share with reptiles and birds. And then it’s only another hundred million years or so to our last shared ancestor with the lionfish, back in the Late Silurian Period. At that time, atmospheric CO₂ was around 4500 ppm, ten times what it is at present, and most of the world was ocean, dotted with low-lying islands, ravaged by superheated storms and other extreme weather events.

The creature currently known as Meemannia eos, from the evidence of a few bone fragments found in China, is the best candidate we have for this shared ancestor. While undoubtedly fishy, M. eos has pores and canals in its skull which look like those of lungfish, coelacanth, and tetrapods—the evolutionary line that we are part of. And then we spin off again: the fishy side of the family tree splits and splits and splits again until the Scorpaeniformes—lionfish, scorpion fish, sea robins, sticklebacks, lumpfish, and others—emerge, alongside perches, cod, and flatfish, sometime in the Late Cretaceous, sixty to a hundred million years ago. So, four hundred million years down the evolutionary rollercoaster—and four hundred million years back up the other side. That’s how different we are; and yet, again: hello!

We have been brought together by the reconnection of two oceans separated for twenty million years, and the burning of the bodies of two-hundred-million-year-old forests, and also by several hundred—thousand?—years of Western, scientific thinking, of racism, speciesism, seafaring, and migration, which frame every aspect of our encounter. Here we float, twenty meters below the surface, in the warming waters of a still-young sea. Those millions of years which separate us also bind us together. We have survived the superheated storms of the Late Silurian, and all five mass extinction events so far. We’ll see who comes through this one, and what novel ecosystems, what new systems of relations and solidarities, we will create along the way.