Animal · Indonesia, Philippines, Papua New Guinea
Red lionfish
Pterois volitans — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The red lionfish is a striped reef fish whose long fins spread out like a mane and carry eighteen spines filled with venom. It hunts at dusk, herding small fish into a corner with its fins and swallowing them in one quick gulp.
Picture credit: Rickard Zerpe (CC BY 2.0) · z2amiller (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Ram-Man (CC BY-SA 2.5) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the red lionfish live?
Home: Coral reefs and rocky lagoons of the Indo-Pacific.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Indonesia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Malaysia, Japan, Fiji, the Solomon Islands.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: up to about 47 cm long. It weighs about 0.5 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
A red lionfish drifts slowly over the reef, so sure of its spines that it almost never hurries. The spines are for defence only: thirteen along the back, three under the tail and one on each side. Its venom hurts a person badly but is rarely dangerous, and the fish never uses it to hunt. Instead it corners prey with its wide fins and opens a mouth big enough to swallow a fish almost half its own length. Lionfish belong in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, but some ended up off Florida in the 1980s and have since spread through the whole Caribbean, where no local predator knows what to do with them. Divers there catch them by hand, because lionfish taste good once the spines are cut away.
Find it on the globe
Red lionfish is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Is a lionfish dangerous to people?
A jab from its spines causes sharp pain and swelling that can last for hours, and the usual first aid is hot water on the wound. Deaths are extremely rare, and the fish never attacks by itself; it only stings when someone touches or steps on it.
Why are lionfish a problem in the Caribbean?
They do not belong there. After escaping into the western Atlantic in the 1980s they spread fast, because Caribbean predators do not recognise them as food and the local reef fish do not recognise them as danger. One lionfish can eat a great many young fish, so reefs lose the species that keep them healthy.
What do lionfish eat?
Mostly small fish, shrimps and crabs. It spreads its fins like a fan to steer prey against a rock, then strikes so fast that the prey disappears in a fraction of a second.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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