Here Come the Lionfish

February 11, 2025 at 11:10PM

James Bridle, the technologist and author of Ways of Being and New Dark Age, centers this insightful essay on the lionfish, and what some people view as an “invasion” of the species in the Mediterranean. Bridle uses an unexpected diving encounter with the fish as a starting point to explore nonhuman migration over millennia due to geological and climatic change, imperialism, and colonialism. “On my second dive, I met a lionfish,” they write. “This was not the first time I had done so: I remembered their prickly, languorous form from a reef three thousand miles to the south, some twenty years ago, off the west coast of Africa. But I did not expect to meet them here, in the northwest corner of the Aegean, in a deep gulf of a different ocean.”

Always take the time to read the latest from Bridle. I very much enjoyed these thought-provoking observations on the ocean, migration, and deep time.

Infinitesimally and over millennia these plates drifted towards one another, until they collided in the area of modern Iraq, some fifteen to twenty million years ago, creating the modern Mediterranean, and cutting it off from the Indian Ocean. Stranded on either side of this divide were marine species which had evolved together but which would now pursue their own, separate evolutionary adventures, creating two wonderfully diverse but entirely disconnected biospheres. This state persisted for almost all of those twenty million years, until, in fact—and quite precisely—the 18th of August 1869 with the cutting of the Suez Canal.

There is a relationship, and always has been, between the way we treat other people and the way we treat other creatures. I don’t want to eat the lionfish, because I am vegan, but also because I don’t want to eradicate another species, another community, just because I think it’s in the wrong place. Moreover, who are we to determine who belongs where when the conditions which make life habitable in any particular place are continually changing—and have been for billions of years?

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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/11/here-come-the-lionfish/
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Here Come the Lionfish