Perverse Incentive Jujitsu
Lionfish are an invasive species. The solution? Eat them, say some:
Sustainable-seafood advocates typically advise consumers to stay away from overfished, endangered species, but in this case they’re taking the opposite tack. Federal officials have joined with chefs, spear fishermen and seafood distributors to launch a bold campaign: Eat lionfish until it no longer exists outside its native habitat.
It would be great if this worked. But if you create a demand for lionfish among gourmet diners — the ones who’d shell out $24 a pound for the stuff — people might just start farming and protecting the damn things, which would inevitably escape from the fish farms. Or people might go to the lionfish’s native habitat, where they are presumably common, too, and hunt them to extinction there, even as they proliferate everywhere else.
This is not to say, of course, that any particular overfished species is in the clear, and that the magic of the market — how I hate that phrase — will save them. It could well be that the stable equilibrium we’re headed toward is a unitary ecosystem, in which only a smattering of not particularly interesting animals and plants overrun everything else, punctuated by farm-maintained populations of the commercially valuable ones, as dictated by mid-21st century tastes. This would be a depressing outcome.
But the point is simply that I’m not confident either way — whether we can eat the lionfish to death, or whether our appetite for tuna can save the bluefin. It strikes me as hubris to make a prediction either way.
Invasive fish species are a big problem in much of the country. Here in KY we have a problem with big head carp in certain lakes. Our state-sponsored hunting & fishing program just did a special last week where they tried to encourage sportsmen to catch as many of these as possible. The host of the show showed how to clean and cook them which was an effort to dispell the notion that carp tastes bad. He said it was delicious. I for one am ready to try bowfishing them later this year. At 40+ pounds that’s good fun.
I guess my round-about point is that sometimes even endangered species can be problematic in the wrong habitat.Report
@Mike at The Big Stick, Are those the same ones that jump out of the water and clobber people in the boat? I heard there was a huge market for them in China.Report
@Jim, I believe so…Report
I think that encouraging the eating of invasive species is actually a good idea.
In order to be a successful invasive species the fish in question have to be prolific, tough, easily multiplying and omnivorous. The very characteristics that make them excellent invaders would also make them an excellent food fish and would make them difficult to hunt to extinction.
Also important to keep in mind is that fish consumption is roughly as high as it’s going to be. Adding another fish to the menu will have at least a slight negative impact on the amount of demand for other species. If by encouraging the consumption of a prolific nuisance fish means that we produce any amount of easing of the pressure on endangered fish species then that’d be mightily useful.
Finally if you can get people to fish the damn things for free then you have hopes of not having to pay people to fish for the things and that’s mighty handy in these times of tightening budgets.
Frankly I don’t see the downsides.Report
@North, Apparently the eastern species of crawdad has colonized Lake Washington just to the east of Seattle. It seems to have pushed out the native species. I think bilogical colntrol is worth a try, especially in view of all the very tasty ways to eat this invasive pest.Report
@Jim, Indeed Jim.Report
“It could well be that the stable equilibrium we’re headed toward is a unitary ecosystem”
You’d be amazed at how hard this would be to accomplish. Many plant species from one place simply fail to reporduce in identical climates elsewhere, usually because of insurmputable differnences in the soil. This is the case for instance with Douglas fir, which by now should cover most of Britain. Meanwhile in the douglas fir’s home ecosystem metasequoia fails to naturalize, wher eit should become an out of control weed. In fact differences like these are one of the engines of speciation – in California very complex geology intersecting with very complex microclimate patterns has lead to lots of speciation in a number of genera.
Of course there are many examples of invasive plants, and as many of invasive animals. But given a little tiem they will radiate into new species. And that will mean some endemic species bite it. But it’s not like humans invented this. Look up the Great American Exchange. when the continents connected a huge number of South American species went under.Report
I never really understood why the Hebrews and Egyptians never just harvested and ate the locusts when they brought plague upon the wheat crop.Report
@Christopher Carr, Have you ever had locust bread? It’s terrible…Report