The silver-cheeked toadfish has been chewing through Greek fishing gear for the better part of twenty years. This week it made the news again when Heraklion fisherman Nikos Kourakis landed a specimen around 50 centimetres long and put the video online.
Lagocephalus sceleratus came through the Suez Canal from the Red Sea and has been in Greek waters since at least 2005. Its flesh contains tetrodotoxin, a neurotoxin for which there is no antidote, so selling or eating it is banned across the EU. Its jaws cut nets and longlines and take commercially valuable fish and cephalopods off the hooks.
The Hellenic Centre for Marine Research estimates the damage at roughly 8,500 euros a year for each boat working the southern Aegean. Stathis Evangelou, who has fished around Astypalaia since he was nine, told Kathimerini he pulls up as many as 200 of them in a day.
Nothing in the Mediterranean eats it, which is why the numbers keep climbing.
"It's an omnivorous fish that eats everything it encounters," said Michalis Margaritis, fisheries officer at WWF Greece. "Octopus and clams are among its favorite foods. Due to climate change and rising sea temperatures, they find fertile ground in which to settle. They have no natural predators, and they cannot be consumed by humans, so they multiply rapidly and spread."
Crews are now steaming further and fishing deeper to avoid it. Rhodes fisherman Michalis Karpodinis told POLITICO: "Until a few years ago we used to fish at 40 to 45 meters, but now we have to go nearly 200 meters deep to find red mullet. I avoid the spots where I know there are frequently pufferfish, so I have no choice but to go fishing in distant places that are deeper."
Greece's answer, borrowed from Cyprus and paid for with EU funds, is a bounty. Licensed professional fishermen in Crete and the southern Aegean will receive up to 5.33 euros per kilo landed - a rate the agriculture ministry says beats the Cypriot scheme by as much as 52 percent. Fish will be taken during breeding season, counted and incinerated.
The ministry is careful not to promise eradication. "The purpose is to provide an incentive. It's more of a financial support program for fishermen," general secretary Spiros Protopsaltis told Mega TV. "Since it arrived in the Mediterranean, [the pufferfish] has come to stay. The question is how we will limit its population."
The bounty arrives alongside fuel subsidies of 0.16 euros a litre for April and May and 0.12 for June, compensation for vessels shut out by marine park restrictions, a new register requiring recreational anglers to log catches, and a points system replacing automatic suspensions for infringements.
Ioannis Bountoukos, who heads the Panhellenic Association of Midwater Fisheries, accepted the pufferfish pilot as a step forward but said the fuel support falls well short of the costs boats are actually carrying, and questioned limiting the scheme to selected regions.
"The problem of pufferfish is for fishermen," she said, putting the share of Greek coastline where beachgoers face no issue at 99.5 percent. Fish do not attack people, she argued, unless they have been fed or handled into unnatural behaviour - and the population has not spiked dramatically compared with recent years. One beachgoer poisoning has been recorded in Greece, in Crete in 2022.
Miliou would rather see the money go into fisheries management and invasive-species monitoring than a per-kilo bounty. The pilot will show which view holds up.
