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Fighting Invasive Fish With Forks and Knives
An anonymous reader writes NPR commentator Bonny Wolf has a unique solution to battle the threat of invasive fish species in our waterways. She proposes we fight them with a knife, fork, and a few lemon wedges. From the article: "Take the northern snakehead, which has made its way into tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay. It competes with native species for food, and then eats the native species, not to mention the odd frog or bird, with its mouthful of sharp teeth. It's been called "Fishzilla." It breeds fast, has no natural predators and can grow to be 4 feet long. The northern snakehead hangs out in grassy shallows, making it hard to catch. But a couple of years ago, Maryland started promoting the snakehead as an eating fish. Its harvest has increased from zero to 5,000 pounds a year."
Does "promoting" mean passing out some posters or getting rid of the requirement to purchase a fishing license from the State to keep the northern snakehead? There are plenty of folks out of work who could help here in a win-win situation. We already have systems in place to police the fish that people keep and removing all restrictions on invasive species taking would go a long way towards reducing their populations.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Those are the fish that can move 1/4 mile across dry land to find new places to live. It probably crawled out of water and ate that word out of the summary.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
In Europe we have been eating this type of invasive specie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wels_catfish) for long but... As its flesh is tasty and as selling these fishes has become quite successfull, we now have farms of such fishes! Of course, these farms compete against fishing in living waters! So, eating invasive species may not be the most successful way of getting rid of them...
I agree that eating the invasive fish is a good idea. After all if we didn't put catch limits, and encourage catch and release, on the normal game fish people would have fished them to extinction. So really all we have to do is convince people they are good eating and then make no efforts to protect the invasive fish. My guess is once it gets going people will gleefully over fish them. Just have to make sure people stick to the undesirable fish.
I don't know about lion fish but both Asian carp and northern snakeheads are good to eat. They eat Asian carp extensively in China and the northern snakehead is commonly consumed in Thailand. I have seen them for sale in markets where the northern snakehead was stuffed with what looked like lemon grass, other herbs and covered in a layer of salt and then grilled. I never tried it simply because I am not keen on fish.