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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."
I think the fish accidentally a word there with its mouthful of teeth!
ipv6 is my vpn
Take the what? Is this my browser? I don't know what the hell you're talking about.
1. Take the ???.
2. ???
3. Profit!
Genius.
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)
could that possibly go the wrong way because you create demand so later there will be an incentive to actually put _more_ invasive fish into the habitat?
...sometimes all you have to do is eat the problem.
Table-ized A.I.
closely related to the silverback semicolon, but watch out for those pointy asterisks
Table-ized A.I.
I've eaten this fish quite frequently in China, and it's actually quite tasty. I didn't realize it was so highly invasive, but some other fish (like Lionfish) seem to really f' up huge populations/ecosystems when they start to flourish where they don't belong, and I definitely agree that *eating them* is by far a better method than some other fish invasion control methods, like poisoning bodies of water and all adjacent bodies of water to kill everything.
These m'f'rs can actually wriggle over land for a few days out of water to expand their territory. That's badass.
Hmmm, can we legalize cannibalism of politicians?
Table-ized A.I.
The editors have already begun this process by eating the very name of the fish in question.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Before "Jaws", there wasn't much of a market for shark meat. Then demand picked up. Now, the shark population has dropped so much that sharks are facing extinction.
Same species, same proposed solution...back when they first appeared in the US.
One side-effect of this is that people who eat this fish will consume more mercury, PCBs and other harmful substances compared to if they ate the native (potentially restricted-catch) fish. This is due to the northern snakehead consuming poisons in the water plus toxins accumulated in the flesh of their prey. Humans who eat this fish (or any predatory fish) would thus consume more toxins than if they ate a fish (like much of its prey likely is) that only eats primary producers.
The obvious solution involves Needle Snakes.
Seriously though, how much can we interfere with nature to ensure some animals' survival, and continue to call it 'nature' with a straight face? Eventually, the figurative and literal cage bars make it indistinguishable from captivity. Isn't there a point where we should let evolution do its thing? I know that often leads to extinction, but if we're only keeping wild animals alive so we can eat their tasty flesh, then we may as well keep enough to eat captive.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
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...
Brass, the carnivorous alloy...
You know, the solution for harmfull PCBs, mercury and shit isn't tp eat less fish, but to let less of that crap get in to the waters in the first place. A nation wide "don't poop where you eat" idea. And yes, it will cost some money, your tax money, to enforce the regulations. And yes, it will need some rules on what you can just dump into the rivers and lakes and ocean. And fuck the profits. You can't take the money with you anyways. Leave the damn ball cleaner and better than it was when you were born. That's really the only worthwhile goal mankind has at the moment that we can really do something about. Ihabitating space won't happen for a while, and needs more research. Earth we can save today, if we, as a species, could only get our collective heads out of our asses. Every bit helps. Do your share.
I have fished in Florida for 60 years and I flat out love invasive species. They are exciting to catch and easy to catch if one knows how. I was catching snakeheads for several years before reporters first mentioned them. The are very similar to the Bowfins we have always had in Florida and I suspect that they have been in the wild for decades as the fish we thought were bowfins were way to large to actually be bowfins in many vases. We also have oscars as well as many cychlids, peacock bass and rainbow bass as well. So far I haven't seen any silver carp or big head carp but I'm sure they will do well here. We have a mule like Russian carp that was installed to stop certain weeds that get up to about 15 lbs.. And we have the lion fish in salt water in abundance. It adds to the sport of fishing. I say the more species the better. Pythons are common here and we have so many wild hogs that we sort of need the pythons to snag a few. Coyotes also are here as are armadillos which are also invaders. I still like them all.
the term you're looking for is 'white guilt'.
The Asian Carp tastes like shit. It's a greasy, nasty-tasting meat with a mushy texture. Maybe if you put enough breading and spices and deep fry it long enough, you might be able to turn it into a mystery meat and pass it off to someone starving.
It sounds like a great idea, but no. Maybe it could be ground up and fed to cats or used as fertilizer. It would be preferable to then bread and deep fry the cat and eat that then to eat an Asian Carp.
And before you tell me that they eat Asian Carp in some god-forsaken hell-hole on the other side in the world, I would also remind you that the same thing could be said about the cat.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has been suggesting this approach for years with this and other invasive species. Ultimately it's the only way to go. When you say the fish "has no natural predators" - well, I know a *bunch* of potential predators....
Do you have ESP?
but I dont want to eat Americans, they will be high in fat and taste horrible due to all the steroids and hormones they ingest in their meat and the beer that tastes like piss they drink.
Now all we need is some invasive species of chips.
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.
dunno about your cats but mine won't touch Mekong cobbler (a type of catfish the Vietnamese farm in massive numbers and sell at a rate which no other nation would find economically viable). Personally, I don't see anything wrong with it, you just have to not overpower it with flavour. Just a dash of cracked pepper, sprig or two of dill, lightly grill, jobbed.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
If you're worried about too much mercury, just do what our forefathers did: Hang 'em up on a clothes line with their heads down, and when it gets below freezing, cut their heads off.
In many cases, the invasive species aren't competing to survive because they have no natural predators in the area, and the damage they do can go far beyond merely shoving out local species. Best example of this is the zebra mussel.
Zebra mussels were originally from Russia, but are now on virtually every continent (after steadily invading various locations over the past 300 years) because of their tendency to attach themselves to the sides of ships and their ability to reproduce very quickly. They're a huge problem in a lot of places because they have no natural predators in those areas, and due to the fact that their larvae are microscopic can get into water treatment plants and power plants and clog up machinery. We've got a very good reason for not wanting zebra mussels to spread any more than they already have.
Worst part is, you can't even eat them - they're too small.
I think it is a bug in Mozilla Firefox. Try copying the fish's name: "northern snakehead" from the NPR article in Firefox and pasting it
Have gnu, will travel.
Geeks and fishing??/HAHAHAHAHHAHHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHA
cant get them out of the basement to get laid and we want geeks to fish now? lol
Jack of all trades,master of none
Two Rivers Fisheries is already doing this - they fish for Asian Carp, and sell it overseas.
Article about them
Politicians complicate life - logic is sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.
Similar to this is when touring caves or something and they will point out people who signed the cave wall back in the 1800s, but you can't do that today. Somehow it is celebrated that present day people did that in the 1800s, but it is wrong for today's present day people to do that.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
IIRC, when I first saw a video about these things, one of the problems is that when a motor boat goes by they will jump out of the water high and hard enough to injure people in the boat. In the video they were flying outta the water by the hundreds. All you gotta do is set up your nets to catch them in mid-air and "drive around" in your boat. No harm to the native species at all.