Before I leave Belize, I travel back to Placencia. Willie and Abby take me to Tom Owens Caye, a small island now owned by marine conservation nonprofit ReefCI (reefci.com), I join a group of international volunteers, keen divers who prefer to dive with purpose, paying around $1,000 a week to be trained in scuba spearfishing. Together, we learn how to humanely cull those beautiful yet harmful invasive fish (rather than spike our own feet or other volunteers), how to fillet the fish, and preserve the fins we’d most like to see dangling from ears. I’ve been a diver since my early twenties, mostly in southeast Asian waters, where lion fish are native, have many predators, and numbers are kept at bay.