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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.
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.
There is a solution to this problem: goats. Turn all that thorny nuisance into yummy meat and cheese.
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.)
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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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.
That sounds pretty complicated. I would just install a Blackberry Enterprise Server, and that would easily control all my blackberries.
Frankly i think the fight against most invasive species simply creates jobs for public employees.
That's easy to think because it's easy to forget about the species that we used to have, but don't any longer.I'm old, so I do remember the species we used to have back in the 60s. but are long gone, like the rock crab, which is way better eating than the tiny Asian shore crab that displaced it.
Another thing to remember is that Florida is a very big state, so if you simply list all the edible invasive animals, it seems like a cornucopia. But if you look at the situation in habitat by habitat, the situation looks different.The problem these things is that they don't have native predators -- they overwhelm the resources within a habitat. That means you lose everything else in that habitat that was dependent, directly or indirectly, on resources consumed by the exotic. That includes many desirable native species.
Take Tilapia. Of course the're edible, they're a popular aquaculture fish, but they're not *great* eating. They're like tofu: it's all about what you cook them *with*. When they take over a body of water, they displace native fish that are actually *better* eating. So instead of a nice bass, you end up catching a mediocre white fish you can buy cheaper than bait at the supermarket anyway.
Or Asian carp. They are indeed edible, in fact good if you know how to prepare them, but they also displace many, many desirable native gamefish: bass, crappie, catfish, trout and salmon, all of which are superb eating. For a whole list of edible animals you might not be aware of, you get one in their place. That's a raw deal.
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