MORE ON HUNTING AND EATING INVASIVE SPECIES. I think when we message space aliens, the first question we should ask is, “Do you taste like chicken?”

DEALING WITH INVASIVE SPECIES by eating them. Space aliens take note — you could be fodder for “invasivores.”

Plus, a blog. And hunting for lionfish. “Lionfish don’t give ground to much of anything. Watch how it sits right there in front of its crevice even as a diver is right in front of it and thrusting a spear at it. The lionfish has venomous spikes sticking out all around the front of it. An array of hypodermic needles that will either kill or badly hurt almost anything that decides to pick a fight. While that behavior illustrates one of the reasons why lionfish have been able to quickly dominate this habitat (lack of natural parasites in the Atlantic is probably another reason), it also comes in real handy when you are hunting them. They won’t generally spook off unless you injure them with the spear.”

End result: “The lionfish tasted really good. . . . The texture is superior to Chilean sea bass and I think that lionfish represent a viable alternative to much of the ill-gotten Chilean sea bass that is on the market today.”

ISN’T THAT “ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC?” Humans as an “invasive species.” Personally, I think it’s good to be an invasive species.

DOWNSIDE OF A SHRINKING GLOBE: Giant Study Warns Invasive Alien Species Are Spreading Out of Control.

WELL, GOOD: Polar vortex may have killed a significant amount of harmful, invasive insect species.

IT HAS ME THINKING ABOUT DINNER: Invasive Asian Tiger Shrimp Species, Now in the U.S., Has Scientists Worried About Ecosystem.

Adult tiger shrimp, whose native habitat stretches from southern Japan through Southeast Asia to South Africa, are known for distinctive black stripes, can grow to the length of a man’s arm and weigh as much as a pound. While the monster shrimp are just as edible as U.S. shrimp, marine scientists are trying to figure out whether they will upset local ecosystems and possibly supplant smaller brown and white shrimp, mainstays of the U.S. shrimping industry.

I have a solution. And some people seem to be catching on already:

Tiger shrimp sightings reported by U.S. commercial shrimpers increased in 2011, and then dropped in 2012 and 2013. But scientists and shrimpers agree the decline isn’t because the tiger shrimp aren’t there.

“We don’t turn them in anymore,” said Brian Schjott, 36-year-old captain of the Mr. Fic, a Bayou La Batre-based shrimp boat. “We just eat ’em.”

Shrimping last year off the East Coast, his crew pulled in tiger shrimp that were 14 inches long, he said. “We wrapped them in bacon and grilled them with sweet-and-sour sauce,” he said.

If only all our problems were this simple. . . .

DOES THE PROPOSED INVASIVE-SPECIES POLICY discriminate against the hairless?

“IF YOU CAN’T BEAT IT, EAT IT.” Maryland’s Grossest Invasive Fish Has a New Predator: High-End Chefs.

When hundreds of mostly juvenile snakeheads turned up in a pond in Crofton, Md., in 2002, the progeny of discarded pets dumped by one owner, the government poisoned the pond. Two years later, when an angler caught a snakehead in a lake 25 miles west, Maryland drained the lake.

But soon snakeheads were spotted in the Potomac River, which divides Maryland and Virginia as it flows to the Chesapeake Bay. Poisoning and draining weren’t an option. Since then, Maryland has adopted a different tack: If you want to beat it, eat it.

The state sponsored snakehead-fishing tournaments and now sells $15 commercial licenses aimed at those who snag the hard-to-catch fish with a bow and arrow. The Potomac’s commercial harvest, sold to restaurants and wholesalers, has risen from almost zero in 2011 to 4,320 pounds in 2016.

“What better way to try to wipe something out than to get humans involved with it and create demand?” said Chad Wells, corporate chef for the group that owns Victoria Gastro Pub in Columbia.

Indeed. But serving up invasive species is nothing new to Instapundit readers.

GOOD! Whole Foods Market to sell invasive lionfish starting Wednesday.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

HERPES: Australia’s Surprising Weapon Against Invasive Fish.

To rid their streams and rivers of invasive European carp crowding out native freshwater species, officials plan to begin introducing a strain of the herpes virus — Cyprinid herpesvirus 3 (CyHV-3), or “carp herpes” — into fish populations.

In a statement released May 1, Australian Department of Agriculture and Water Resources (DAWR) officials described their National Carp Control Plan, which will be developed over the next two and a half years at a cost of approximately AU$15 million (about US$11.2 million) and potentially deployed by 2018.

Research by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has already determined that the virus kills European carp quickly, and that it does not develop in native fish, in other introduced fish species or in other animals — including humans.

Good to know.

IF YOU MISSED IT OVER THE WEEKEND, MY LIONFISH UPDATE FROM CAYMAN: Yes, You Can Fight Invasive Species by Eating Them.

IT’S A NEW ECOSYSTEM NOW. IF WE GET RID OF IT, WE’LL BE GUILTY OF “HABITAT DESTRUCTION.” The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Is So Big, Invasive Species Are Now Thriving On It.

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.

LIONFISH UPDATE: Here is a picture of one of the two lionfish I saw during an entire week of diving on Cayman.

Their population has plummeted. I’d like to say this is because of people hunting and eating them, but they appear to have just fallen off an ecological cliff, as invasive species sometimes do. They have become much scarcer all over the place. That’s nice, though I do miss their deliciousness.

It’ll be interesting to see how they fare over time. Now that they’re scarce, of course, it’s an especially good time to kill off the ones that are left.

Overall, the much lower level of diving due to Covid and Cayman’s absurdly restrictive policies doesn’t seem to have made a huge difference in the state of the reef. It was good before and it’s good now but there wasn’t some surge of new life. We did see a lot of fish species, turtles, and rays there, but not significantly more than last time, nearly three years ago and pre-covid.

(Yes, this post is a bit late, but I had to hit the ground running when I got home and I’m still playing catch-up.)

WHERE WOKISM IS A OUI BIT DIFFERENT:

But why now, and why in a country like France, with its very different history from the United States? For that matter, why has wokeism taken hold in other European countries, where the radical movement seems in many ways to be an imitation of its American counterpart?

In France, there’s an oft-noted irony within the answer. Despite vocabulary that seems appropriated from American academia, the main concepts originated with a group of leftist French academics in the 1960s and 1970s, who became the rage in many American universities and whose ideas, though simplified and sometimes caricatured, have been enthusiastically reimported into France.

The most influential figure was Michel Foucault, the psychologist and philosopher whose lifelong sympathy for marginalized groups and oppressed people led him to a sustained reflection on the dominating and exploitative nature of power, including its ability to define what is supposedly normal – as opposed to what it considers abnormal or sick.

In matters such as gay rights and equality for women, Foucault-like sympathy for the marginalized feels the same on both sides of the Atlantic. But American wokeness is most powerfully concentrated on a question of race that seems unique to America. Centuries ago, Europe may have engaged in the slave trade, but no European country has anything comparable to the history of American slavery, no decades of Jim Crow, no Ku Klux Klan, no lynchings or legal segregation of the sort that afflicted black America, and also no civil rights movement, no Martin Luther King Jr., and no George Floyd killed in Minnesota. And yet, the vocabulary of critical race theory, with terms like le racism systematique, le privilège blanc, microaggression, even le fragilité blanc, has taken hold in France like an invasive species.

Part of the answer seems to be the contagious global appeal of a doctrine explaining complicated questions, holding the same attraction for French academics, students, and others as for their American counterparts. The appeal is especially strong for a younger generation impatient and dissatisfied with the more moderate views of traditional liberalism — or, in France, the traditional left, even if it was the same enlightened left that fought against colonialism, against anti-Semitism, against the powerful, conservative Catholic Church, as well as for choice on abortion, equal access to education, and France’s extensive social safety net.

Then there’s the matter of demographic change. Britain, Germany, and France have substantially increased their minority populations through high immigration and higher birth rates among non-whites. This has generated two conflicting reactions. One is the increased strength and appeal of right-wing anti-immigrant parties, in France represented most conspicuously these days by a former television personality, Eric Zemmour, who to his detractors looms as a French Trump.

Lisez le tout.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: A herd of ‘cocaine hippos’ from Pablo Escobar’s private zoo are being sterilized.

A group of rampant hippopotamuses, introduced by the late Colombia drug lord Pablo Escobar to his private zoo, are being sterilized by the country’s wildlife services, after mounting concern that the 80-strong herd presented a potential environmental disaster as an invasive species.

The so-called “cocaine hippos”, whose number has more than doubled since 2012, were sterilized after worries have mounted over their environmental impact, including a threat to human safety.

The decision to neutralize the herd’s breeding potential comes after a study earlier this year concluded that the animals had become a hazard. The hippos, which were originally introduced to Escobar’s Hacienda Napoles estate, are one of the most enduring legacies of the notorious cocaine trafficker, who was killed by police in 1993.

I’m looking forward to a reboot of Miami Vice, where Elvis the Alligator gets to meet Escobar’s Cocaine Hippos.

WHY ARE UNIVERSITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF RACIAL BIGOTRY? Student columnist calls white peers returning to campus an ‘invasive species.’

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UConn offers counseling, restricts access to Shapiro event. If you treat conservatives as an invasive species, you’re not really promoting the “diversity and inclusion” you’re always yammering about:

YAF Spokesperson Spencer Brown asserted that the review process was adopted by the public university after a controversial scuffle between Gateway Pundit journalist Lucian Wintrich and a protester at his on-campus lecture in November.

“This level of review was imposed upon the conservative students at UConn who are hosting Shapiro due to the school’s inability to maintain the rule of law at a previous lecture hosted by the campus conservative club,” Brown remarked.

“Student safety may seem a noble cause for UConn to cherish, but why isn’t the same level of restraint imposed on speaking events by prominent leftists?” he asked, noting that “just last week, Anita Hill spoke on campus at UConn in an event advertised as ‘free and open to the public,’ with ‘no tickets required for entry.’”

Think of universities as politicized leftist redoubts and you won’t go far wrong.

LIONFISH UPDATE: Reader Chuck Wingo emails:

Just got back from a 10 day diving trip to the Bahamas, and thought you’d be interested to know that the lion fish population there is down noticeably from a year ago. Last year our group caught about 50 during a one week trip, but this year, on a ten day trip, we barely caught 20. When we questioned the captain of our boat he told us that we weren’t an isolated case: divers all over the Bahamas have been reporting fewer lion fish all year.
No one seems to know why. Popular explanations include divers taking more, and sharks and other predators learning just how tasty they are, but both of these are just speculation. Sharks and groupers at least seem to have developed a taste for them; our group had about 5 taken right off our spears: one by a grouper and the others by gray reef sharks.
It would be nice if the lower population is permanent, but it’s obviously too early to say if this is permanent. On the other hand we all missed having a big lion fish cook out; we barely got enough for some nice lion fish tacos.
One bit of government policy isn’t helping; the Bahamas have marine parks and no take zones, and the ban on hunting in these areas includes the lion fish. We all noticed a larger population in these areas, which may support the theory that hunting is the primary reason the population is down elsewhere, but if an invasive species has a refuge zone we’ll never solve the problem.
Obviously this is an anecdote, not real data, but I’ll be interested if I start hearing similar reports from other areas.

I certainly saw fewer this year than last as well — but more when I went to areas that aren’t dived much. Which supports the theory that lionfish hunting/eating is having an impact. In other words, all is proceeding as I have foreseen.

LET THEM EAT CARP: Asian carp promoted in anti-hunger campaign. The reader who sent this was offended, but I actually favor eating invasive species. It’s the topic of my latest Popular Mechanics column, which is already out in the magazine, though not yet online.

HARVESTING ALGAE ENERGY for pond-powered biofuels:

The science is simple: Algae need water, sunlight and carbon dioxide to grow. The oil they produce can then be harvested and converted into biodiesel; the algae’s carbohydrate content can be fermented into ethanol. Both are much cleaner-burning fuels than petroleum-based diesel or gas.

The reality is more complex. Trying to grow concentrations of the finicky organism is a bit like trying to balance the water in a fish tank. It’s also expensive. The water needs to be just the right temperature for algae to proliferate, and even then open ponds can become choked with invasive species. Atmospheric levels of CO2 also aren’t high enough to spur exponential growth.

Solix addresses these problems by containing the algae in closed “photobioreactors”—triangular chambers made from sheets of polyethylene plastic (similar to a painter’s dropcloth)—and bubbling supplemental carbon dioxide through the system. Eventually, the source of the CO2 will be exhaust from power plants and other industrial processes, providing the added benefit of capturing a potent greenhouse gas before it reaches the atmosphere.

Read the whole thing.

HMM: China launches an autonomous mothership full of autonomous drones.

China christened a remarkable new 290-foot ship last week – the world’s first semi-autonomous drone carrier. It’ll carry, launch, recover and co-ordinate the actions of more than 50 other autonomous aerial, surface and underwater vehicles.

The Huangpu Wenchong Shipyard began construction on the Zhu Hai Yun last July in Guangzhou. According to the South China Morning Post, it’s the first carrier of its kind, a self-contained autonomous platform that will roll out with everything necessary to perform a fully integrated operation including drone aircraft, boats and submersibles.

t’s kitted out with everything it needs to deploy its own boats, subs and aircraft, communicate with them, and run co-ordinated missions, including conducting “task-oriented adaptive networking to achieve three-dimensional views of specific targets,” according to the shipbuilding company. The aerial drones can land back on its deck, and it stands ready to retrieve the boats and subs once they’ve made their rounds.

“The Intelligent, unmanned ship is a beautiful new ‘marine species’ that will bring revolutionary changes for ocean observation,” said Professor Dake Chen of the Chinese Academy of Science’s School of Oceanography.

While it’s mainly pitched as an ocean research platform, the SCMP also reports that it has “military capability to intercept and expel invasive targets,” a capability at the forefront of many autonomous marine projects.

Please note that Beijing went from laying down a new class of ship to christening is less than a year.

MY KIND OF UNDERWATER SPORT: Hunting Lionfish with a Glock. Video at the link.

Related item here.

GOOD, THEY’RE DELICIOUS! New research shows NOAA scientist built a better lionfish trap. “The so-called Gittings trap, named for its inventor, can be deployed deeper than spear fishermen who currently provide most lionfish control, allowing it to catch lionfish abundant at those depths. It also could provide a more regular supply of lionfish, which would encourage more restaurants and retail chains to sell the spiny sea creatures. One national grocery chain, Whole Foods Market, features a page on its website called ‘Get to Know the Lionfish.’ Recipe suggestions include grilling it with herbs and lemon, baking with a bread crumb coating or making into ceviche.”

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

AN APPROACH I ENDORSE: ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em:’ University of Illinois serves invasive Asian carp for dinner.

I’ve been promoting this approach for quite some time.

And maybe this will help attract Chinese students: “To understand why Chinese netizens have taken such an interest in the story, it’s absolutely essential to know that the most popular dinner-table fish in seafood-crazy China is carp, bar none. Thus, news of America’s carp problem doesn’t set off alarm — it makes Chinese mouths water. Add the fact that Chinese covet wild carp — an expensive treat compared to cheaper, more common farmed carp — and poetry ensues. . . . The dominant thread in the ongoing discussion is this: The Chinese people, and their voracious appetites, are the solution to America’s carp woes.”