b'Q&A with Dr. Steve GittingsWe tracked down Dr. Steve Gittings to find out what he as been up to on the lionfish front.Steve is Chief Scientist for NOAAs Office of National Marine Sanctuaries and leads the national response effort to the lionfish invasion in the marine sanctuaries.LFD.com: Steve, how have you been working with sanctuaries and others on the lionfish invasion?Gittings: At the sanctuary level, Dr. Michelle Johnston, the research coordinator at the Flower Gardens, Dr. James Morris, who did a lot of the early research on lionfish, and I wrote a national response plan for the marine sanctuaries.Noweach sanctuary works with staff and partners to do education, monitoring, and removals.But Ive also been working tocoordinate efforts with people in other countries in the region.Right now, Im part of a team organized by LionfishUniversity and conservationist Martha Watkins Gilkes that is putting on a derby in November in Antigua.And last yearwe had a conference with scientists in various Mediterranean countries, followed by a published paper on lessons learned in the Caribbean region that they could use to respond to the invasion in that part of the world. LFD.com: Youve been working for several years on lionfish traps. Why traps?Gittings: Weve all seen how successful spearfishing has been in controlling lionfish populations in shallow water. But below scuba depths, the only removals that happen are the occasional lionfish caught in fish traps.While people areworking on various devices to catch or kill lionfish in deep water, no one is doing regular removals there, yet we knowlionfish abundances can be very high at 200 or 300 feet, and they can be found hundreds of feet deeper than that. In fact, we have two problems, no removals and very little knowledge about how many lionfish there even are at those depths. Traps could help us solve both problems.LFD.com: Dont traps have a down-side, specifically that they catch all sorts of non-targeted fish?Gittings: Yes, many types of traps get what is called by-catchunwanted fish.Thats why its illegal to fish with many types of traps in the US, except with permits.Ive been working on a trap that almost eliminates by-catch by takingadvantage of two particular lionfish behaviorstheir strong attraction to structure and their docile nature.Fishers often lure fish to a location simply by dropping some kind of structure on the bottomtires, old refrigerators, broken upconcrete. Fish like the security of having shelter nearby. Lionfish are also highly attracted to these, even more than12'