By Michael Pollick From Herald-Tribune

Sarasota entrepreneur Allie ElHage didn’t know anything about the lionfish until late 2011.

Four years later, after designing a device that divers use to safely contain the fish, which are festooned with venomous spines, he has become a central player in the effort to rid Florida and Caribbean waters of the invasive species from the Pacific Ocean.

The device is called the ZooKeeper, and word of mouth has turned it into a must-have for many recreational divers in the Caribbean and Florida.

On July 23, National Geographic magazine came out with a feature on Florida’s lionfish problem. The fish are gobbling up vast quantities of smaller fish that are important to the ecology of the state’s waters and taking a chunk out of the state’s grouper and snapper populations by devouring their young.

In the video that accompanies the National Geographic article on the Internet, the ZooKeeper is highly visible.

“Right now, I am about a week behind, filling orders,” ElHage said recently. “Today, I got three emails for 42 units. I mean, it has gone absolutely nuts.”

Solving a problem

Today, millions of lionfish are swimming in Florida’s coastal waters, according to Lad Akins, director of special projects at a Key Largo-based non-profit group known as REEF — the Reef Environmental Education Foundation.

“Worst-case scenario, we could see dramatic impacts to our entire marine ecosystem, including impacts to commercially important species like grouper and snapper, ecologically important species that maintain the health of the reef system, resulting in impacts to tourism, and even possible extinction of some fish,” Akins said.

Ten years ago, there was no such thing as a lionfish hunt. But now, because the fish has no natural enemies in these waters, man is stepping in to try to control it, and the events have become common.

Scuba divers, recognizing that they are doing the world a favor by killing the fish before it decimates native fisheries, are organizing contests to see who can spear the most lionfish in one trip, typically using Hawaiian sling spear guns. In a recent one-day contest held in Sarasota, 27 divers bagged more than 400 lionfish.

The fish are easy to spear, and their fillets are said to be great to eat. The biggest problem divers face is getting the fish into the cooler back on the boat without getting poked by one of the fish’s 18 venomous spines.

If you are lucky, getting stung by a lionfish spine is like a super-strong bee sting.

But it can be much worse. On ElHage’s first lionfish dive, off the island of Curacao, he was 90 feet below the surface when he got poked by six spines in the palm of his hand.

“That would be considered a really bad sting,” ElHage said. “The pain is almost instant. Kind of like someone pushing a red hot iron up through your arm. It hurts a lot.”

“My whole arm swelled up, from my shoulder to my hand, and was completely swollen for, like, 10 days.”

Product’s development

The ZooKeeper story started in 2011, when a friend on Curacao told ElHage about the fish.

The son of a Lebanese immigrant to the United States who then relocated to Curacao, ElHage, a U.S. citizen, grew up on the Caribbean island, then studied architecture in the U.S. He moved to Sarasota in 1998, where he made a living first as a spatial designer and then as a real estate speculator.

ElHage met his wife, Angela Smith, in Sarasota in 2006. She is active in the business and thought up its name, which they have now trademarked. Her rationale was that the name ZooKeeper opens up more marketing possibilities than a product tied to one species.

In 2009, following the real estate crash, ElHage moved back to Curacao, where he was marketing LED lighting solutions to businesses as a way of cutting their high electric bills when his friend challenged him to come up with something that would keep divers safe while they collected lionfish underwater. He came up with the ZooKeeper — a custom-extruded PVC cylinder with threaded ends.

Once he has a fish impaled on a spear, the diver pushes it through a flexible set of flaps shaped like a funnel on one end of the container. It is not difficult to pull the spear back out, but the lionfish remains trapped inside the hard plastic canister until the diver is ready to dump his catch into a cooler.

ElHage discovered the need for a second element — a water-displacement valve at the other end of the device — through his own scary underwater experience. He was diving, trying out a prototype.

When he shoved a big lionfish into the top of the container, two smaller ones he’d caught earlier popped out, propelled by the sea water being displaced by the bigger fish. One of them landed right between his eyes, fortunately hitting his dive mask and not his flesh.

After that problem was solved, news of the product’s effectiveness spread quickly.

“It was such a big hit, I decided to make it a full-time job,” ElHage said. In 2012, he tried making the ZooKeeper on Curacao, but the complications of island life made it difficult.

The couple came back to Sarasota to make and market the product.

He owns the rights to the design of the injection molds that create the parts that screw onto the top and bottom of the canister, and has a patent pending on his invention.

Demand broadening

So far, the business is just the couple working out of their home and garage. Smith handles the books, while ElHage handles assembly and sales.

But a recent flurry of orders and a rapidly evolving distribution deal with a major scuba diver supply house could change that.

Their big break came in 2013, when Trident Diving Equipment of Chatsworth, California, became a distributor.

Trident is a dominant player in the recreational diving industry, distributing a wide variety of equipment to 1,600 North American dive shops.

“It just took off,” said Aly Gherardi, daughter of Trident’s founder, Lowell Dreyfus, and export manager for the company.

“In two years, I have probably sold 1,500 of them.”

As July ended, Trident decided that it needed to keep its own inventory of ZooKeepers out in Chatsworth.

So ElHage worked overtime and built an extra 76 of the devices, a pallet-load being shipped as this article is published.

He has developed a number of different models, with the average retail price around $112.

At a big scuba diver trade show coming up in Orlando in November, he plans to broaden his line-up further.

ZooKeeper puncture-resistant gloves, anyone?

IMAGE: Sarasota entrepreneur Allie ElHage likes to catch and eat lionfish, an invasive species that is taking over Florida coastal waters. ElHage invented the ZooKeeper, a cylinder for stuffing away lionfish after you spear them. STAFF PHOTO / DAN WAGNER

For more on this story go to: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20150810/article/150809673?p=4&tc=pg