Slashdot Mirror
Should We Eat Invasive Species?
The Washington Post's Energy & Environment section raises today the question of whether the best way to control certain invasive species is to eat them. The biggest success story on this front in the U.S. has been the lionfish; it destroys the habitat of some other fish in the areas where it's been introduced, but it turns out to be a palatable food fish, too. Its population has gone down since the start of a concerted effort to encourage it as a food, rather than just a nuisance. The article touches on invasive species of fish and crustaceans, but also land animals and plants. I know that garlic mustard (widespread in eastern U.S. forests) is tasty, and so are the blackberries all over Seattle.
Let's hope the rest of the earth's species don't adopt this plan to control the invasive naked apes.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
every year seattlites eat all the blackberries they can pick. The only thing that cut that down was when people began spraying them. But you cold not possibly get more people eating them, and that didn't dent the population in 50 years. On the otherhand no thinks of them as invasive in the sense they were not natural to live there. the pacifc northwest is berry country. Just a thorny nuisance you have to keep cut back when it encroaches walkways not unlike choking vines on trees.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm waiting for recipes....anyone ? :)
Make their parts 'magical', like rhino horn and tiger penis.
lets hope they dont follow that rule when we branch out, after we have used up the earth's resources.
( yes i know, that technically in time the earth will recycle everything we dont take with us, but we wont have that sort of time to wait )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have trouble clearing Himalayan Blackberries because of folks that seem to think they can't get enough fruit from the massive patch on the other side of the fence. Fools.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Somebody should get working on using the biomass of Kudzu as an energy source. When something just won't go away, figure out a use from chopping it down.
If they're palatable and economically harvestable, they're prime candidates for om nom nom nom.
The Chinese have a saying that roughly translates to: "If it swims, crawls or flies and its backbone faces the Sun, it's edible."
Lots of invertebrates and crustaceans that don't meet that criteria also still make it to the table. Heh.
Not in the wild but cultivated.
The cow, the chicken, the pig... these animals have no natural habitat anymore really... yet are in no danger of dying of. Neither for that matter is the domesticated dog or the house cat or the gold fish.
All small endangered animals can be bred as pets or food. By all means, protect their habitat in the wild but that is no guarantee that they will survive as a species. Maintain them as pets or food in our society though and they'll live as long as we continue to do that.
As for large animals... encourage farmers to take care of a couple. Seriously, a cattle rancher could take in a few rhinos. Have a special pen for them. Make the whole thing tax deductible until there's some way to recoup the cost. These people breed BILLIONS of animals in captivity. We could do the same with rhinos, elephants, etc.
Right now one of the things hurting these species is that its very hard to legally own them.
An animal that belongs to no one will not be protected. We've seen this in Africa where the wild animals are prey for poachers. However, if you give the animals to the local villages and make the animal's survival the villager's responsibility they suddenly stop getting eaten or killed for their ivory.
This is the solution.
Anything else will likely harm these species more, waste time, waste money, and accomplish very little.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
They are the Africanized Bees of the Rubus World. -The nastiest thorns, crowding out the friendlier native species, but the fruits are larger and more numerous.
Better than Hedera by far, but not really welcome in a balanced environment.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
So in that sense this is the most elegant natural solution.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
There is a solution to this problem: goats. Turn all that thorny nuisance into yummy meat and cheese.
You can eat all of the blackberries you can get to and the plant is still there.
They tried this a couple of decades ago in South Louisiana with the nutria. It turns out people weren't waiting in line to eat real life ROUSes. (Rodents Of Unusual Size)
Now the state offers a $5 bounty per nutria tail turned in.
load "linux",8,1
If you can keep the harvest local relatively, you can replentish this as a source of food and nutrition. Introducing these invasive species to a global market, you will destroy the source.
Given that 'being eaten' is the plan for plants that go to considerable metabolic expense to produce attractive fruits or berries, those probably aren't good candidates for this strategy. (Admittedly, humans probably excrete more of the seeds into the water treatment plant than birds do, so they probably aren't the ideal customer; but fruits are still the deliberately expendable seed carriers, not life-critical components.)
...every species was an "invasive" species to the established ones in the particular eco-system.
sure..of course eat them...uhh that's how things work on mudball Earth.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
I think they're as invasive as species come. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Plus five insightful. Mechanical control is difficult but effective, The canes grow, then the next year they fruit, and the next year they die. It makes a hell of a mess, and gets harder to clear as time goes by, burying, then killing anything else in the area. Like Kudzu. Spraying Glyphosate is an ugly, but popular option. I favor the Flamethrower.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
50 years?
just wait another 50 years and it's a staple of the eco habitat in seattle and you'll be fined for poisoning them.
thats what I wonder about the lionfish population, if they eat them to almost extinct in the area.. and it takes 10 years to do so, will greenpeace tell you to quit eating them?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Blackberries can be controlled, you just have to invest a little time. Basically? When you pick, tie a small ribbon on the branch you got it from. At the end of the growing season, cut out anything with a ribbon on it, because that vine will never produce fruit again, it will only become a "stringer", which spreads to produce more vines.
This way, the plant can be controlled and kept to one area. But again, you have to invest time, which not many people have a lot of these days.
[End Of Line]
This is certainly how my cat handles invasive species...
Eating blackberries won't dent the proliferation, especially not if you poop in the forest.
Apparently bears do it too, but nobody ever saw them doing it.
The typical muni approach is to mow it down - this actually promotes spread.
Knotweed produces an amazing mono-floral honey. It compares to buckwheat honey and black sage honey.
It gets a PR spin as "bamboo honey".
Haven't had it as a veggie yet, but it gets some good reviews.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
now I don't have a complete case history for all invasive species but I do recall reading that in one case the fish that was introduced was from the local population wanting to eat a fish that was non-native and otherwise unavailable, so they imported the live fish into the local region
That weed is at least as far west as the central plains states, and it is spreading quickly. Unless we can train some indigenous critters to start eating it our forests are in danger from what it does to the soil. Even though it is rather tasty we can't possibly eradicate it ourselves just by pulling and/or eating it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
And there's Kudzu where I live. It's not very tasty.
It was introduced here in the South East for erosion control by the farmers.
Unfortunately, it chokes off trees and other indigenous plants.
And then there are the asshats who buy exotic creatures like pythons and release them into the wild when they get too big.
The difference being that natural selection is a slow process. What people are doing is causing a much faster change in the ecosystem by moving species around to places they did not evolve in. What we are doing is not a natural process.
I'm not intent on eating members of the species Arion vulgaris any time soon.
Ezekiel 23:20
I live in South Florida. Lionfish is available with just a short drive down to the keys. It has a good taste and even better, no guilt whatsoever. I think it's just natural that we should eat them. BTW, Florida lobster down this way (they call them crawfish up in the Northeast :/ ) were once so plentiful that it was given to prisoners. If it's edible, someone will find a way to eat them.
A few parts of kudzu are edible, but the *taste* is like sucking spinach flavored snot.
Only if they are edible.
Is it only me who thinks that all this talk about "invasive species" is fundamentally xenophobic and recist?
I loathe the Himalayan Blackberry. The berries, while large and numerous, are bland. They store a lot of energy in their roots quickly, so once they get a foothold, they send out shoots everywhere- especially after you cut them back.
Goats are the best remedy. I had a single goat clear an acre of 8-10' tall bramble in a span of a few months. For good. They eat new shoots as soon as they appear until the blackberry roots have expended all their stored energy.
If you don't have a goat, then you must remain vigilant. I have a zero tolerance policy towards blackberries. If I see one on my property, it dies.
Can we eat evangelical Christians? They're pretty invasive.
You don't need to eat them all. Just turn them into jam and distribute. I'll happily eat the jam.
You mean, treating environmental issues pragmatically instead of as a new religion works better? Who knew?
Why you gotta waste time with a ribbon and coming back later?
Pick the berries then chop the shit down immediately right then and there.
Here in Boston we don't have a feral pig problem, but we do have gourmet butcher shops that sell game and exotic meat. I've tried feral pig and it's good, but intense -- intense enough that I wasn't sure I liked it at first. The best way I can describe it is "extremely piggy".
I'll explain. Imagine on one hand a cooked chicken breast. Imagine on the other hand a regular, commercial pork chop. There's a clear difference between the two, but it's ... subtle. Now imagine a place far beyond the other hand, where the difference is as subtle as being whacked in the face with a shovel. In an era where pork is marketed as "the other whtie meat" the distinctive flavor of pork has been toned down to the point where nobody will be offended, but feral pig is unabashedly swine-y. Not everyone will like it. By *I* do.
According to the article feral pigs reproduce so successfully in many places that it would be impossible to put a dent in the populations through hunting, but I choose to call that "sustainable". Trying to eat these animals into oblivion (if you can stomach them) is an environmental "can't lose", especially if you count the environmental cost of industrial scale hog farming. I'm very happy to pay some guy from Texas to remove the problem from his ranch and send it up here so I can put it on my plate.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Honey bees are an invasive species. They were brought to the Americas in the 1600's. Now people are panicking about colony collapse and trying to save this invasive species. I thought that is how nature works, life seeks out new and better environments to grow in. Does it matter if a bee is blown across the ocean by a hurricane or carried over by a Spaniard? Or if a mussel makes to the great lakes on the bottom of a tanker or on a piece of drift wood?
Florida has a lovely python population and they can be eaten or made into boots. We have tilapia in abundance. We have the the snake head fish from the orient as well as peacock and rainbow bass and also some species of piranha. I welcome all of these invaders. We also have armadillos and iguanas both of which also are good eating. All in all i want more. I wish the jumping silver carp as well as the big head carp would invade Florida big time. Poison toads are killing a few pets but other that and one nasty, African snail that can actually eat the plaster off your exterior walls i tend to love the exotics. They are fun to catch and some get really large. And we don't even want to get into the good things that Kudzu vine can do if properly used. We have invasive bamboos which are also wonderful. Some items seen to be a curse tend to become valued. The dreaded zebra mussel in the Great Lakes has become a great food source for sturgeon and the water is cleaner for having them. Lampreys were cursed and considered an emergency and now people cook and eat lampreys. Frankly i think the fight against most invasive species simply creates jobs for public employees.
That sounds pretty complicated. I would just install a Blackberry Enterprise Server, and that would easily control all my blackberries.
The majority of invasive species in Minnesota (other than fish) are pretty much inedible, because they were brought here by accident (emerald ash borer) or as decoration (eurasian water milfoil, buckthorn, etc), and were never intended to be a food source
Blackberries can be controlled
Indeed! In our back yard, they are losing the battle against the ivy and bamboo! :)
Indeed! In our back yard, they are losing the battle against the ivy and bamboo! :)
Sheesh. There are spots in my yard where the three coexist quite happily.
In my younger more naive days, I made the mistake of planting Hedera Helix (English Ivy) - that is one very nasty plant.
#DeleteChrome
The obvious answer is magic tentacles. I haven't yet come up with a marketing angle though.
Here in Canada, we have an over-crowded seal population eating way too many cod fish, and the rest of the world is trying to get us to stop hunting them.
http://www.sealharvest.ca/site/?page_id=16
Blackberry is expensive fruit in many other countries, for eg., Middle East. In fact, one can make a business out of this.
Good luck with that. -the voice of experience
1. Invasive species cost money to get rid-of.
2. People pay quite a bit of money for good-tasting food.
Making invasive species valuable can make-up the shortfall for governments being unwilling to spend the requisite amount of money needed to deal with them, but it doesn't NEED to be "food".
Figure out how to make cane toad carcasses into fashionable ash trays, or kudzu into motor vehicle components, or anything else people are willing to PAY FOR, and you'll solve the problem. A better solution would be for governments to stop doing a half-assed job, and just spend the amount of money needed, to deplete the invasive species.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Problem with feral pig is tape worm and other type of infections and contagions.
fyi, armadillo blood can cause leprosy, it is scientifically proved, so take care.
snake head fish is great by the way.
Oh wait, that would be cannibalism.
Though it may be accepted in some cutlers, I figure that cannibalism would exempt humans from being eaten, though they are an invasive species.
Cook it to the old FDA internal temperature recommendation. Problem solved.
Tapeworm eggs can also be killed by freezing to -4F for 24 hours. My local butcher carries game and it's always deep frozen, probably for this very reason.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
They are used as a natural border since it is a thorny viney mess. But during late July and August you can pluck it for blackberries. They are very delicious and can be used in a number of yummy things. But they are hard to kill and will take over if you don't stop it early. Some places you have to burn it to get rid of it because it keeps coming back.
Happy planet Earth for all = kill 50% of human population!
Blackberries can be controlled
Indeed! In our back yard, they are losing the battle against the ivy and bamboo! :)
Are you sure that your bamboo is not knot-weed? Knot-weed is not a bamboo but another invasive species.
Every time I take a trip to the Keys I'll grab a nice Lionfish meal at a local restaurant. It really is a delicious fish as well as being an invasive species. I like to think I'm helping the ecology of Florida every time I have dinner there.
One way to take care of them is to paint the cut end with concentrated brush killer. The stuff you normally mix with water and spray to kill these pests. It kills the vines and, since you aren't spraying indiscriminately, doesn't hurt the surrounding plants.
Yup. Knotweed is fairly common in the area, but there's none in my back yard.
Kudzu : AKA "the devils ivy" and "the vine that ate The South" I used to work in the landscaping business and have actually sold this stuff as an indoor decorative plant. I'm pretty sure that people taking it home and putting it in their yard instead is why we're seeing it up in Canada now. Out of curiosity, I've actually tasted kudzu leaves and it's not something I'd ever want in a salad or stewed greens. (but other people enjoy the taste of say grape leaves, so that doesn't completely rule it out.) There are apparently uses for the starch derived from the roots, but I have no experience with that. The damned stuff grows faster than goats can eat it, which is saying a lot. It grows so fast that in ideal conditions you can SEE it growing, you'd almost swear it was capable of following you. I think the best use isn't as food, but as biomass stock. The problem with using it as biomass is that it exhausts the soil pretty quickly.
zebra mussels. As far as I know, in the areas infested by them, the mussels are not edible because of the various nasty things they filter out of the water and sequester in their tissues. I don't think ANY Great Lakes shellfish would be edible for that reason. It used to be you couldn't eat any fish caught in the Great Lakes, especially the lower lakes, because of industrial nasties like mercury and dioxin accumulation. I seem to recall that white fleshed fish species are safe now, as an occasional menu item only. Filter feeders from the Great Lakes, especially if eaten regularly like we'd have to do to keep them under control, is probably still a Bad Idea (TM Animaniacs)
Overall; my concern is that deciding to eat the invasive species is tantamount to an admission of defeat. It's certainly a step towards learning to simply accept that they are part of the local food chain. I am not an ecology and conservation expert by any means, but I think with at least some of the invasive species we may still have a shot at eradicating them if necessary. (if Monsanto or Dupont manage to come up with a kudzu specific herbicide that degrades elegantly/cleanly they'll make a mint down in the southern US)
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
We need to stimulate a big demand for wild pythons and boas in South Florida. If they became a locavore food, then dealing with their invasion in South Florida would become much easier.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Without doubt the most significant, consequential, and pernicious invasive species on most parts of the planet -- I hear there are colonies now even on Antarctica -- is homo sapiens. But it would not be wise to start eating them.
I kind of want to shoot the stray dogs that run through my yard, but I don't think I want to eat them.
Wineberries (Rubus phoenicolasius) are considered an invasive, noxious species to be destroyed on sight. But why would you want to destroy something so very delicious and tasty? I have some growing on my property that drove all my fancy named cultivars to extinction, and good riddance. These berries are better tasting anyway, and the seeds were free from heaven above, or at least a bird's cloaca from above. Bird shit never tasted so good.
Problem with feral pig is tape worm and other type of infections and contagions.
Believe it or not, but Science andcooking have managed to evolve in the last 2000 years.
Of course, feel free to keep to the old ways, but just realize that a lot of those guidelines are now dangerous by not adapting to shifting issues.
drift wood? up the Saint Lawrence seaway, over Niagara Falls? After crossing the salty ocean from freaking China?
Hurricane? you're going to get enough queens across the Atlantic in a hurricane?
This is retarded. There's a reason these animals haven't crossed in the millions of years before humans.
[blackberries] are losing the battle against the ivy and bamboo! :)
Down here in the south, we've got honeysuckle and kudzu. I could send you some of those (Take my wife -- please!) and you could then sponsor the VFW (Vegetarian Wrestling Foundations') ---
Fight of the Plants!
You could leave admission free as a loss-leader, then charge for refreshments, housing, and other long term care items, including, no reason at all, Roundup and machetes.
Warn your guests not to stand or sit in any one place for too long though, or they might become a bit more "One with Nature" than they were expecting.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Yeah, I can't spell. VWF there; sorry.
(Guess I'll have to turn in my membership card now. I didn't like fighting with vegetables anyway -- they usually won.)
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
In addition, should we eat non-invasive species? Um... YES.
So, illegal immigration is good but invasive species are bad? They're just hardworking life forms doing the jobs native life forms won't do!
Goats are not a solution to this problem, whilst the goat can eat the thorns...it pretty much has to be the only thing left on the menu. Goats will consume easier food first, and thorny balckberry doesn't make it into the easy group.
Cannibalism, huh?
Some Boston residents would disagree, especially when the Habs were in town.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Problem with feral pig is tape worm and other type of infections and contagions.
No. The problem is access to hunting lands. "Oh, you want to hunt on my private ranch? That'll be 2k!" There is very little public land in Texas to hunt on. Also, who in their right mind would would let a bunch of people hunt? (Not sure, we do it all the time up here in dah Nort, but not with pig hunting.)
So the issue becomes rancher pays a few professionals to get rid of pest pigs. Then turns around and lets one or two parties hunt. But overall, the pigs are left alone.
COULD we eat more of them? Sure, but it's cheaper and easier by far to plop down yet another pig farm.
No duh.
Probably not. The native habitat for lionfish is the Indo-Pacific oceans. They are not threatened in those locations. They are invasive in the Caribbean especially.
In the Caribbean, they have no natural predators. Additionally, they are voracious eaters, and scarf up hundreds of immature reef fish each day. The quantity of native reef fish has dropped precipitously in the Caribbean due to invasive lionfish. Being able to _actually_ eliminate them from the Caribbean would be a fantastic coup, and allow the reefs to regenerate back to something of their former glory.
As a side note, though, how many people actually pay attention to what the extremists in Greenpeace tell them to do? Have you stopped driving your car? Eating beef? Shut down your nuclear power plants?
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Berries are meant to be eaten. Why else would a plant put yummy sweet stuff around its seeds? You're actually helping the plant to thrive if you pick the berries (especially if you drop a few here and there while picking, or otherwise spread the seeds around).
If you want it gone, pull it out at the roots, and only then pick the berries.
What happens when companies start to breed the invasive species?
In England, I hunt and eat grey squirrel (invasive from North America - check), rabbit (invasive from Eastern Europe (introduced by the Romans) - check), canada goose (invasive from North America - check), and when I come across them, ring-necked parakeets (check it out - feral invasive!) make for a tasty stick snack.
The rabbits and the geese are relatively large animals, being that they'll provide for two, sometimes three or more meals each, which is kinda handy. Three rabbit and half a dozen squirrel (a quiet weekend's kill) feeds me for a week.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
mechanical control is the only way to control blackberries. I've seen vines blast across ground obliterated by a Roundup treatment as if it were virgin laid potting compost. My method involves liberal application of machete followed by incineration. Leaves me with a lovely fertile ash which gets turned back into the soil. Cow parsley gets the same treatment, that stuff is evil (not to mention highly toxic to humans and aggressive in growth/spread), incineration is the ONLY way to dispose of that.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
ok, hands up anyone who ever listened to a word Greenpeace had to say, considering their ships drink fuel oil pumped probably from the same wellheads they try to blockade with their fucking boats?
Thought as much.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
How about chocolate covered Fire Ants or Killer Bees?
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
There is an old recipe for rabbit stew that begins --
First, decide if what you have is a "rabbit"...
I believe this has worked for chicken and goat.
I doubt the rumors about mackerel and prawns.
--
MY FACE MY FACE oh god no NO NOOOO NT stop the angles are not real ZALG IS TO THE PONY HE COMES
I loathe the Himalayan Blackberry. The berries, while large and numerous, are bland. They store a lot of energy in their roots quickly, so once they get a foothold, they send out shoots everywhere- especially after you cut them back.
Aye -- and the canes grow and branch quickly. I used to own close to 20ac and battled them constantly. They tend to grow in a fountain shape, which when sufficiently large makes it difficult to get at the base for cutting. The canes also branch and intertwine, which coupled with the nasty-ass thorns makes control a battle at any scale. I had a commercial front-mower with a 72" deck and got reasonably good at death from a thousand cuts -- I'd hook a clump around the spindle on the deck's front wheels, then back up to lay it out flat (a move I learned from snakes), then run over it with the deck and repeat. I still have scars on my arms from the inevitable thorn attacks, and never found anything that would stop them. There are evergreen blackberries too, the ones with lacy / dissected leaves, but they seem less aggressive. There's also actually a delicious native, the dewberry, but it's small and much better behaved, so it can't compete.
Goats are the best remedy. I had a single goat clear an acre of 8-10' tall bramble in a span of a few months. For good. They eat new shoots as soon as they appear until the blackberry roots have expended all their stored energy.
Agreed, it is astounding to watch goats go after this preferred yet armored delicacy, especially since they have no upper teeth. I still don't know how a Nubian can stand on its spindly hind legs to reach up.
If you don't have a goat, then you must remain vigilant. I have a zero tolerance policy towards blackberries. If I see one on my property, it dies.
I hadn't the time/energy/$ to be that extreme about blackberries there, but I sure was about the @#$@#$@# japanese knotweed. Dumbass previous owner planted it because he thought it was friggin' bamboo. Blackberries are nasty, but knotweed, that shit is just plain the devil incarnate, and nearly impossible to kill short of nuking the site from orbit.
In and near Seattle there is a company (www.rentaruminant.com) that will rent you a goat and someone to watch it if you want, so you can clear blackberries even without owning a goat.