In the Lion’s Den – UWI grad captures, sells pesky fish

(Trinidad and Tobago Newsday) – When Riesa Sumair graduated from UWI, St Augustine in 2015 with a degree in business management, her parents probably didn’t expect she’d choose fish vendor as her profession.

“They have been incredibly supportive, though and have been the ones pushing me to stick with this fish-vending business,” she chuckled.

Riesa, 24, is the founder of Lion’s Den Seafood, a sustainable seafood distributor that started out as a hobby, but morphed into a major outlet for divers in Tobago to hunt and sell lion fish, an invasive species wreaking havoc on local reefs.

“It didn’t start out as an entrepreneurial endeavour. My diving team and I would go on dives and it was just like, oh, there’s a lion fish. We need to get rid of them. And we’d catch it for dinner,” she told Business Day. She did notice, though, that lion fish could be a sustainable niche market and no one else was filling the gap, and so she decided to do that herself.