About & Sources

About

The Lionfish Project

The Lionfish Project was founded by Steve Bender, founder of the 7 Seas Initiative, whose flagship program, The Panama Project, runs community-managed coral restoration (Rotary Reefs, on Isla Solarte) alongside plastic waste reduction, youth education, and community health work in Bocas del Toro, Panama.

The Lionfish Project narrows that mission to one specific, solvable threat: invasive lionfish. What started with local divers, fishermen, and restaurants removing lionfish from Bocas del Toro's reefs and building a market for eating them has grown into a wider Caribbean and global effort — turning an ecological problem into local income, and into an easy conversation about coral reefs, invasive species, and marine conservation for every visitor who orders it off a menu, wherever lionfish threaten a reef.

This site is intentionally educational first: most of what you'll read here is sourced from NOAA, university researchers, and established reef-conservation organizations, alongside first-hand reporting from Bocas del Toro and the wider region.

Sources & Further Reading

Cited on this site

• NOAA Fisheries — Impacts of Invasive Lionfish
• NOAA Ocean Service — Why Are Lionfish a Threat?
• NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries — Indo-Pacific Lionfish
• World Resources Institute — Atlantic and Caribbean: Lionfish Invasion Threatens Reefs
• University of Florida IFAS — Invasive Species of Florida's Coastal Waters: Red Lionfish
• Lionfish Central — 5 Ways Lionfish Destroy Coral Reefs
• REEF — Invasive Species Program
• REEF — Sanctioned Lionfish Derbies
• USGS — Total Mercury Concentrations in Lionfish, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary
• Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch — Super Green List FAQs
• NC Sea Grant — Ingesting Invaders: Serving Up Lionfish
• The Bocas Breeze — local Bocas del Toro reporting on lionfish tournaments
• ARAP — Autoridad de los Recursos Acuáticos de Panamá (official lobster closed-season resolutions)
• Infobae Panamá — 2026 lobster closed-season calendar (citing Gaceta Oficial No. 30473)
• The Panama Project

Photo Credits

Recipe photos

The lionfish dish photos on our Recipes page were taken at Florida's Lionfish Removal and Awareness Day events and are courtesy of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (MyFWC), used under a Creative Commons CC BY-ND 2.0 license.

Gallery & illustration photos

• Diver with speared lionfish, and lionfish tasting/removal-event photos — Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (MyFWC), CC BY-ND 2.0
• Lionfish close-up — Michael Gäbler, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
• Healthy coral reef photo — Randi Rotjan / New England Aquarium, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Depleted, algae-overgrown reef photo — FWC Research, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
• Coral tree nursery photo (illustrating the restoration method used by programs like Rotary Reefs) — NOAA's National Ocean Service, public domain

The coral nursery photo above illustrates the "coral tree" method generally — it is not a photo of the specific Rotary Reefs nursery on Isla Solarte. If you'd like your own nursery photo used instead, just send it our way.