THE NEW YORKER HAS A PIECE ON Killing Lionfish.

Bowman found that local restaurants were happy to accept a lionfish catch. “They’re low in mercury and have some of the highest omega-acid content of any fish,” she told me. It was not particularly important to her that her activity could be described as environmental activism. “I’m just a bartender who goes diving,” she said. Nor did she know that she was breaking the law—restaurants can serve only fish acquired from authorized providers. (That way, if there is an illness, the source can be traced.) She recalled, “The wonderful people at F.W.C.”—the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission—“reached out and said, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is awesome. It’s also illegal.’ ” Instead of fining her, though, they encouraged her to sell her fish through proper channels, and with supporting paperwork.

In May, 2016, Bowman became the first person to sell lionfish to Whole Foods. For a while, her photograph accompanied a display of lionfish dumplings at the supermarket chain. Bowman’s father died before this happened, but she thinks he would have been thrilled to find that she had also ended up a commercial fishing captain. “That would have been the moment I finally made up for not being a boy,” she told me. The Whole Foods purchase became an important crossover moment for eating lionfish. Al Massa, who is the chef at Brotula’s, a seafood restaurant in Destin, told me, “A lionfish’s sweet, flaky light-white meat can take a wide variety of sauces, from classic beurre blanc to a roasted-red-pepper broth or a yellow-tomato gazpacho.” (In 2017, Gordon Ramsay filmed himself incorporating lionfish into a Caribbean seafood curry.)

Thanks to lionfishing, Bowman started making real money.

See also my piece from over a decade ago: The Perfect Way to Get Rid of Invasive Species—Eat Them.