Christina is studying invasive lionfish for her PhD at Oxford University. Two species of Indo-Pacific lionfish (Pterois volitans and P. miles) were introduced off the coast of Florida in the 1980s and now occupy a wide geographic range in the western Atlantic. Lionfish exert a range of detrimental effects in their invasive range, both through predation and through influencing the behaviour of other species. Current lionfish management involves culling by recreational divers, however, there is very little guidance on how to maximise catches, when to target culls and which individuals to target. Christina aims to provide solutions to these problems using behavioural experiments, dissection data and a tagging study in Honduras, Central America.
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