Starshift

Photo by Taso Viglas via Flickr. Licensed under CC.

In 2011, shortly after the start of the new year, an unusual creature appeared in the waters around my island. Unlike the legendarily vast boars my father claimed he had hunted with his father in the previous century in the primeval reaches of Dominica’s mountains, or the witch-women we called soucouyant who were said to abandon their skins at night and fly across the skies as balls of firefly flame in search of children’s blood to drink, this little creature was undeniably real. A specimen had been caught by Dominica’s Fisheries Department. 

The fish’s slim bronze-and-white-striped body was barbed on the top and sides with venomous, striated spines; its eyes were wide and gloomy—the kind of unnerving yet elegant entity one might expect to find in the aquarium of a conniving Bond villain. It was a red lionfish, the first of its kind recorded in Dominica, as striking and strange as a waterfall in a desert.

At first, it was just a curiosity, if not a conspiracy, for those Bible-quoting Dominicans who imagined that all new things were the result of Satanic forces gripping the planet. I was intrigued by its peculiar, perilous beauty. While scuba-diving, I loved floating just beyond the sea’s extraordinary creatures, even the ones I knew might hurt me if I got too close: the blue morays that poked their heads out of rocks with mouths open, the purple and black sea urchins with their spines jiggling in the current, the brown stingrays that glided like great magic carpets over the sand. The lionfish would simply be yet another marvel of nature to admire from a distance.

The lionfishes began showing up more and more, filling the excited stories of grinning snorkelers and the nets of flummoxed fishermen, who scratched their heads as they pulled their blue and red dinghies ashore to the beaches. Chefs began speculating that they had a new delicacy on their hands. Dominica’s food was delicious, but we were not well-known for culinary innovation; a new fish on menus seemed exciting.

But soon, people stopped smiling. The lionfish was everywhere. Turn on the radio or TV news, and people were talking about the spiny creature. It had quietly begun to colonize our reefs, disrupting the ecosystems through the voracity of its appetite. As it spread, other creatures left, or died off, for it had few predators. As the lionfishes’ numbers swelled, the coral reefs we once expected to be there forever for us to explore, our bodies surrounded by shimmering clouds of fish, were slowly emptying of other marine life, evanescing away. An atmosphere, it seemed, had shifted in Dominica, like a party whose soundtrack had gradually moved from soca to the blues. 

It was strange, this invasion happening in a country that had already been colonized multiple times. But unlike the French and the British, the lionfish represented a slower, more serpentine takeover. It was an altering of our world, not through brute