The Fish that Ate Florida
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2017
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As part of the BBC Life Stories season, exploring our relationship with the natural world, we travel under the sea in pursuit of a major ecological threat to Western Atlantic coasts - the Lionfish. The species, which recently spread from its natural territory in the Pacific to Atlantic waters, is aggressive, exotic and very, very hungry. How did the lionfish go from being an aquarium favourite to the scourge of an aquatic ecosystem that eats everything in its path?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the BBC World Service, welcome to the latest edition of the documentary podcast. |
| 0:06.0 | Every week we bring you a range of stories from our presenters and reporters across the world. |
| 0:11.0 | Please do rate the documentary on your podcast app and leave a comment. Let us know what you think. |
| 0:18.0 | This is what it sounds like under the water in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast. |
| 0:29.0 | You're hearing this because it's where our story begins and possibly where it will end if it |
| 0:40.0 | ever does end. Our oceans face a variety of threats, acidification, warming, pollution, but in the Western Atlantic, the most recent threat lurks down here, in |
| 0:57.8 | deep parts of the ocean, unknown to most of us. I'm Kent de Pinto and as part of the Life Story season on the BBC |
| 1:06.0 | World Service, we bring you the story of a voracious, uninvited, underwater predator that is stalking southern US waters. |
| 1:16.1 | Welcome to the fish that ate Florida. |
| 1:21.2 | When I first saw them, I did not realize that they were bad. I don't think anybody did. |
| 1:25.1 | Anybody the first sees them thinks all this thing is awesome. And then you look |
| 1:29.1 | next to it and there's another one and then you realize we're surrounded. |
| 1:33.0 | Your mind would have a hard time fathoming the amount of reproduction that they were capable of. |
| 1:38.0 | And they're built really vicious. |
| 1:40.0 | Their eyebrows are horns. |
| 1:42.0 | Their nose is horns. their teeth are horns, |
| 1:44.0 | anywhere you touch it, it hurts. |
| 1:46.0 | They're very, very aggressive eating, they hunt at night, |
| 1:50.0 | they're opportunistic, they're just bad all the way around. |
| 1:53.0 | They spread out from Florida all through the Caribbean, |
| 1:57.6 | down to the South American coast |
| 1:59.6 | and the entire Gulf of Mexico in less than 10 years? That's huge. It's literally probably the worst |
... |
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