... This post is about feral cats btw.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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Wow, this keeps the problem going. They need to be culled as its said they can eat up to 50k fish thru their lifetime. They are killing off huge swaths of native fish on the reef.
And from what I have been told they taste pretty good...
Explanation? What is that thing?
But they neutered it...
I think is a reference to feral cats.
At least in north America, domestic cats are far from the top of the food chain and have many predators. Which is why they don't live outside human civilization. Lionfish have no predators in the areas they're invasive, which is the problem. Though it looks like both sharks and grouper can be trained by humans to eat them so once that chain is established the lionfish might start declining.
How to Train Your Grouper
They're better off eating them. :)
a neutered animal still consumes resources
If your goal is to lower a population over time, neuter and release can be very effective. Neutered males will still try to mate but they will not succeed. The females they try to mate with might not mate with another male, so they miss the chance to create a new generation.
Sure, but then it dies without having children, stopping the resource consumption. It might be delayed, but it's still a halting force. I'm also confused as to what the issue is - do they have some way of bypassing being neutered?
It could be net positive by wasting mating attempts from other wild individuals, decreasing offspring amounts of the population.
iirc some places airdrop sterile mosquitoes to reduce mosquito populations.
if you want to remove them from the area entirely because they consume too many resources, why would you go to the trouble of performing surgery and re-releasing it to consume more resources instead of just killing it. the former solves the problem in the future, the latter solves the problem now
There is some benefit to this in some cases: they compete with the others of their species for the same finite set of resources, causing fewer breeders to make offspring. They might also attempt to breed with a fertile mate (unsuccessfully), causing that mate to never produce offspring when they otherwise would have.
The effectiveness of this is obviously very dependent on the species and their breeding habits, and I know nothing about this one. I'm just talking about the general case.
Because a lot of people consider killing an animal to be unethical.
No but if you’re going to capture these it’s just a waste to neuter them. The problem is how many other fish have no defenses against them so in effect you’ve done nothing, the lionfish is going to continue killing for the rest of its life. The proper way is to just spearfish them and take them to a restaurant for them to cook for customers. You’ve then both “neutered” them and removed the destruction
Well, the reason some people don't kill them is because they consider it unethical to purposefully stop a life, but besides the 5-15 year offset for lifespan, it'll still be effective in stopping the problem. The issue with invasive species is that they breed quickly and outcompete the native species due to that factor, but that wouldn't happen if they prevented the invasive species from breeding. Killing them all or neutering them all barely makes a difference; given a few years, they both result in none remaining.
Incorrect. Neutering them will still result in massive loss of life or extinction of species on the reef. Anyone who cares about animals and the reef will kill them, not neuter and rerelease.
Sure, and a lion being alive results in a "massive loss of life" as well, so long as you consider a single creature's influence to be "massive," but that doesn't mean we kill them. People don't want to kill things because they don't want to do it themselves, not because they specifically want to limit total deaths. Not saying it's better, but it's still an option, and it's still better to let the people who don't want to kill them neuter them instead, rather than not helping at all.
But you can kill hundreds for the price it costs to neuter a few.
Sure, and plenty of people do, but the people who don't want to kill them can neuter them - there's no drawback to gain their help when the alternative is that they simply wouldn't help. So I'm still confused about why this post is implying that a person who neutered one is somehow making a big mistake.
Just one won't impact anything substantial.
Yeah, little guy looks like he learned his lesson. It'll be fine.