Over the past decade, the lionfish has become known as an invasive species in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Ocean and the South Atlantic Ocean.
In this paper I consider practices of counting and classifying the lionfish, as well as the further course of actions that led to a gamification and automatisation of the controlled culling of lionfish populations.
In the new habitats of lionfish, different projects of reducing the lionfish population by killing them have emerged – from lionfish spear hunting as a tourism attraction to the use of robots who are trained to kill lionfish. None of these ideas are a novelty – neither touristic hunting for pleasure nor using robots as ckilling machines – but their execution, combination and moral framing around lionfish allows us to consider these gamified killing/ culling practices and their consequences in a contemporary setting. It allows us to ask questions about the global and local epistemologies, moral frameworks and labelling rationalities that at present establish a situation, in which killing/ culling is a legitimate game, or even morally worthwhile game to play. This paper sketches out a theoretical framework and proposes an approach for the ethnographic exploration of the global “Lionfish Game”.
