30
votes
An invasive fish with teeth, that can breathe air, live up to three days outside of water, move short distances on land, and grow three feet long has been found in Louisiana
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- Title
- This invasive air-breathing fish that was spotted in Louisiana: What to know about the snakehead
- Authors
- Emma Hurt
- Published
- Jul 11 2023
- Word count
- 463 words
Not the most pleasant looking fish but I'm glad it tastes good. It's always an incentive to get citizens to help with removal of those sorts of things when they can eat them.
I was just thinking if there's one thing I know about people in Louisiana, it's that they'll figure out how to make this thing delicious.
There's not much to figure out, fortunately. Snakehead give really nice, dense fillets without the muddy taste so many freshwater fish have. They're perfect for fish curries or stir frying. Anything you can do with catfish you can do with snakehead.
This has been a paid message for the Board of Snakehead Marketing
Thing is, it becomes an issue on it's own.
Invasive thing turns out to be delicious, businesses pop up to cater to delicious invasive thing, invasive thing needs to be eradicated, business relies on invasive thing not being eradicated, eradication makes business fail, a business with a guaranteed failure mode if successful doesn't get created as no sane person would do so, invasive species thrives because no one is eating it because no one will make a business that is specifically doomed to fail.
I thought you were about to say "business starts breeding invasive species, specimens get out, invasive species more prolific than ever".
There's a long proud history of breeding invasive species! One classic example I can think of is cities trying to cull rats by offering a bounty... so people started breeding rats just to turn in for the bounty. After officials learned of this, they cut off the bounty, people dumped the rats, and the problem became worse than ever.
I think that was in India with poisonous snakes, the British offering reward for turning them in so people just started breeding them and then once the British found out, they stopped and well people just released them.
Wouldn't be surprised if they did this with rats as you said as well.
I double checked. You're right that there's the one in India with snakes (that led to the name often used for this kind of perverse incentive, The Cobra Effect). The rats were in Hanoi, Vietnam while it was a French colony (French Indochina) in the early 1900s.
I love how the French and British both did this lol
Colonizers gotta colonize!
Indian cobra problem, it's a textbook case of perverse incentives.
BBC radio today was extolling the virtues of eating very-invasive Japanese knotweed (they termed themselves invasivores) and i had just the same thought as you expressed: best not to extol the attractions of something you don't want.
Yeah, stands a better chance of being controlled than the muddy tasting Asian Carp. Most we can do to that is electrocute them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0EYv8yod3A
Asian carp doesn't taste bad IMO, they've been pushing it as a food here in Illinois, every time I've had it I've enjoyed it. I've heard that the bigger issue is it's difficult to clean it on an industrial scale.
My limited understanding of science tells me that we just give it a few hundred million years (or more) and we'll have a whole new human species native to Louisiana.
This was also my first thought with the description in the title.
Soon there will be nothing but hell fish, kudzu, bamboo, and maybe some trees of heaven and gypsy moths. Fortunately, these are all edible.