Dangerous Beauty

The Lionfish
Pterois volitans

Watercolor 47x33 cm.

Detail: [link]

This nice fish is native from the Pacific and Indic Ocean, he is a versatil and voracious predator.
He can eat 6% of his weight in a day and expand its stomach 30 times its size and he could spend 3 months without taste a snack!
Also the female put about 2 million eggs several times in a year. In his natural conditions he mantains a balance with his preys and predators, but now he became in a problem: he is expanding as plague in the Atlantic ocean and Caribbean sea, where he has not natural predators and is very hostil with "paceful" species for those seas...

But why he is in the Atlantic ocean? 6 species was accidentally delivered in Florida USA, during hurricane Andrew, from a domestic aquarium. Sometimes people set them free in the sea, because he grows too much and becomes very hostil with another fishes. His favourite prey is the Parrot fish (a very important builder of coral reefs), and mero larvae

Now he is finishing with entire populations of native Caribbean fishes, unbalance the natural equilibrium.