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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.
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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.
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 ----
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.
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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
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.)
Never mind energy [1] -- goats love it. They can actually snarf it down faster than it grows (which is a trick, let me tell you, in the Gulf States.)
Kudzu-fed goat milk cheese is perfectly good stuff, or you can just let them feed their kids. Which not long afterward become cabritos. Nom!
[1] Long-term sustainability issue here unless you return the non-fuel sludge to the area to restore minerals. Not so much of a problem with goats excreting all over place.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I'm waiting for recipes....anyone ? :)
A cat can be substituted for possum in any recipe. You can sample a wide variety of possum and other varmint dishes at West Virginia's annual Road Kill Cookoff. You can check Wikipedia for a summary of laws and regulations concerning collecting and consuming road kill in other states.
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.
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The crows have figured out how to deal with cane toads.
They started out by eating them alive, through the mouth, but figured out gutting them was easier.
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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.
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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.
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 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.
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.
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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.
It is recommended that the dish be left to simmer for five hours before being garnished with bush plums and mistletoe berries.
And here is the one line answer on how to eat pretty much anything: boil the crap out of it until you render it to component molecules. Sprinkle something less offensive over it.
Ice cream for desert.
What's not to like?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Blackberries can be controlled
Indeed! In our back yard, they are losing the battle against the ivy and bamboo! :)
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)
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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.
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.