Major lionfish hunt launched

Modified male insects have been used to control populations several times before. Most early attempts were with the release of sterile males created by irradiation. One of the first successes was against the screwworm fly before the second world war in the south-east US. The war disrupted experiments but, by 1952, laboratory and field experiments suggested the approach had promise. A large-scale experiment on the Caribbean island of Curacao demonstrated a spectacular success of the sterile-male technique — the island was completely rid of the screwworm fly in 1954–1955. The technique was then used in the south-east US which led to the eradication of the fly in the region by 1959 and the substantial depression of it over vast grazing lands in Texas starting in 1962. Successes obtained with the sterile-male technique plus the considerable positive experience with insecticides led Ed Knipling of the US Department of Agriculture and colleagues to construct a formal theory of the principles for insect control by the mid-1960s. He presented his theory to the Entomological Society of America in 1965. Knipling argued that the core of a sound system of insect control was based upon attack against the total population of the pest, not isolated pockets occurring in individual fields. He also argued that single suppression techniques were subject to limitations, but that combinations of different techniques could compensate for the individual weaknesses and allow the combined package to overcome the law of diminishing returns. Insecticides were efficient in killing insects when the populations were large but inefficient when the numbers were small. The sterile male technique, in contrast, was inefficient in killing large populations but highly effective when numbers of individuals were small. A sequential use of insecticides and the sterile male technique could reduce a large population to a small one and then continue to a miniscule population or zero, he argued. The antibiotic-dependence strategy could see a new approach to achieving disease vector control. Keys National Marine Sanctuary last month to take the unprecedented step of licensing hundreds of divers to catch the fish in the reserve where no other species are allowed to be taken. “We want people to get out there and kill as many as possible,” says Sean Morton, superintendent of the reserve. Researchers are not sure how the fish got to the Atlantic and Caribbean but some suggest they may have arrived from a damaged beachside aquarium during hurricane Andrew in 1992. To encourage divers to hunt the fish, local competitions have been Major lionfish hunt launched