Despite a summer with very little Lionfish Derby action, our Invasive Species Program has been keeping busy with plenty of projects, including several grants that we have recently been awarded to support our ongoing lionfish work. First, we're excited to share that REEF has been awarded $299,087 through NOAA's Saltonstall-Kennedy Competitive Grants Program, to study the effectiveness of lionfish traps on deep reefs in the Florida Keys.
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Last weekend, 13 teams of scuba divers took to the water and collected 1,618 invasive lionfish during the 2025 REEF Florida Keys Lionfish Derby & Arts Festival. Teams fished from sunrise to sunset on Friday, April 25 and Saturday, April 26. The derby weekend concluded on Sunday, April 27 at the REEF Campus in Key Largo, with a festival celebrating the intersection of art, science, and marine conservation. The festival included lionfish scoring, cooking and dissection demos, plus numerous educational activities, games, and vendor booths.
Last month, 14 teams of scuba divers took to the water and collected 1,527 invasive lionfish during the 15th annual REEF Florida Keys Lionfish Derby & Festival. Teams fished from sunrise to sunset on Friday, Aug. 16 and Saturday, Aug. 17. On Saturday evening, derby participants and the public gathered at Florida Keys Brewing Company for Invaders on Tap, a lionfish awareness celebration and social with live music, educational activities and games, and lionfish tastings. The weekend concluded on Sunday, Aug.
KEY LARGO, FLA. – Last weekend, 13 teams of scuba divers took to the water and collected 1,618 invasive lionfish during the 2025 Florida Keys Lionfish Derby & Arts Festival, hosted by Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF). Teams fished from sunrise to sunset on Friday, April 25 and Saturday, April 26.
Eighteen teams of scuba divers took to the water and collected 919 invasive lionfish during the 2022 REEF Florida Keys Lionfish Derby & Festival. Teams fished from sunrise to sunset on Friday, Sept. 9 and Saturday, Sept. 10. The event concluded on Sunday, Sept. 11 at Postcard Inn Resort & Marina in Islamorada, with an outdoor festival featuring lionfish tastings, cooking and dissection demos, games, interactive booths, and live music. More than 400 people attended the event, along with over 20 partner organizations who hosted booths.
From April 23–26, divers, captains, families, and ocean lovers gathered for REEF's 17th Annual Florida Keys Lionfish Derby & Arts Festival — and by the time the scales were tallied, we had a brand-new Florida Keys record on our hands. Over two days of competition, derby teams pulled 2,480 invasive lionfish off South Florida reefs, smashing the previous Keys record of 1,898 (set in 2023) by a jaw-dropping 31 percent. It's also a new all-time high across REEF's full derby program that over nearly two decades has been hosted across Florida.
If you haven't checked out the 2016 REEF Trips schedule yet, now's the time. We have an exciting lineup of destinations planned, and we hope you will join us. These trips offer a great introduction to fish identification for novice fishwatchers, and are a fun way for experienced surveyors to build their life-list while interacting with fellow ocean enthusiasts. We are also offering three of the ever-popular Invasive Lionfish Research Studies trips.
Frequent culling of the invasive Indo-Pacific Lionfish throughout the Caribbean has been shown to cause a shift towards more wary and reclusive behaviour by lionfish, which has prompted calls for halting culls. This paper, co-authored by REEF Lionfish Program researchers, addresses those concerns and reviews research conducted by REEF and other research efforts. Culling successfully lowers lionfish numbers and has been shown to stabilise or even reverse declines in native prey fish.
During last month's REEF Florida Keys Lionfish Derby & Festival, twenty teams fished from sunrise to sunset for two days, and ultimately collected 1,215 invasive lionfish. The event concluded on Sunday, Sept. 12 at Postcard Inn Resort & Marina in Islamorada, with an outdoor festival featuring lionfish tastings, cooking and dissection demos, games, interactive booths, and live music.
This seminal publication was created by REEF and our collaborators at NOAA, ICRI, the United Nations Environment Programme, Caribbean Environment Programme, SPAW-RAC, and the over 40 participants of the 2010 Caribbean Regional Lionfish Workshop. The guide provides best practices for lionfish control and management, including control strategies, outreach and education, research, monitoring, legal considerations, and ideas for securing resources and partnerships.