Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species

by Jackson Landers

  The sun had gone down and the kitchen in Mojo’s pleasant wood shack was lit by the warm glow of a couple of bulbs. The cooked fish was white and firm, looking much like good cod or sea bass. I took a bite.

  The flavor was clean and bright. The firm texture was reminiscent of that of Chilean sea bass. Very good. Nothing “fishy” about it. This stuff could credibly appear on the menu of any high-end restaurant. In fact, lionfish has it all: flavor, texture, environmental responsibility, and a dash of romance — the knowledge that a diver had to risk a hit from the venomous spines has got to add to its marketing panache.

  That night I lay in bed looking up at the wooden ceiling of Mojo’s shack, thinking that if food writers would promote the fish, and if wholesalers, fishmongers, and chefs would order it and put it in front of diners, then lobstermen like Spider would spear them in quantity. People like Mojo would teach them how to handle the fish safely. The continuous chain of refrigerated shipping from the Bahamas to the United States is already there to support trade in spiny lobster, conch, and grouper. All of the pieces of a system to clear out the lionfish en masse on a commercial scale are right there just waiting to be brought together.

  Until those elements are linked, though, Mojo’s belief in accepting personal responsibility for the problem is making just a small difference — but a real one nevertheless.

  European Green Crabs

  Within days of returning from Eleuthera, I did a phone interview with James Gorman, of the New York Times, for an article he was writing about the concept of eating invasives. I’d been working on this book full-time for several months and had also been blogging about the idea. At this point I was, as far as I knew, the only public advocate for eating invasive species as a systematic response to their threat.

  Gorman coined a term to describe those who espoused the concept: invasivores. At first I wasn’t keen on the word but, on further reflection, I realized Gorman was right. This whole thing really needed a unique name to describe it.

  As a result of the official name, people got the impression that I was part of an invasivore movement. I started receiving all sorts of e-mails and interview requests about the “movement.” In reality, there was no movement. It was just me, driving around, killing weird things, and eating them. As Arlo Guthrie says in “Alice’s Restaurant,” greatly abbreviated: It takes three people to make an organization and fifty to call whatever you’re doing a movement.

  After a while, though, it became self-fulfilling. People all over the country asked me for advice about how to hunt iguanas or starlings or whatever other invasive animal was in their area. Other bloggers began writing about it. Somehow a nascent movement actually took shape.

  Discovering the potential for putting lionfish on restaurant menus got me excited about creating markets for invasive species as food. After Gorman’s piece in the Times, I received good feedback from chefs and foodies about the prospect of putting a price tag on certain species. The biggest barrier to selling most invasive creatures as food here is the maze of U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Food and Drug Administration paperwork and regulations — specifically, the requirement that most species be killed in an approved slaughterhouse rather than in the field. The exception is seafood. Fish can be killed on the boat and still be sold as food. I figured I ought to take a look at what else was in the ocean near American shores that could be rounded up in large quantities and sold without legal hassles.

  European green crabs seemed to fit the bill. Carcinus maenas is a small crab that has increasingly dominated portions of the east and west American coasts since its accidental introduction in the early 1800s. It’s thought to have been brought to American shores from Europe in the ballast tanks of ships. Also known as a littoral or shore crab, it’s incapable of swimming to the top of a bucket of water, let alone across the Atlantic Ocean, without human intervention. Shore crabs are unfussy omnivores that will eat many types of plants and any animal protein they can scavenge, including oysters, small fish, and other crabs.

  I have a vivid memory of what must have been European green crabs from when I was five years old. My family was staying in a house on the coast of Maine for the week, and every day my brother and I would climb around the rocks at low tide, gathering mussels that our father steamed for dinner. One morning, while looking for mussels, I stopped to watch a drama unfold among a group of crabs.

  A large crab, about the size of my hand, was engaged in a battle under a few inches of water with five much smaller green crabs. I thought the larger crab would surely win right away, but the smaller crabs kept up their attack. One of them got onto the big crab’s face while another had him from behind. One of the big crab’s legs was severed and things were generally not going his way when my mother called my brother and me back to the house.

  In hindsight, those smaller green crabs must have been the European invaders. Through their tenacity, numbers, and willingness to eat whatever presented itself, they were beating down that larger native crab just as surely as they have dominated most of the East Coast north of the Chesapeake Bay. Commercial fishermen don’t like them because they’re believed to kill and eat young Dungeness crabs. They also drastically reduce clam populations. The town of Edgartown, in Massachusetts, decided the crabs were causing so much harm to the native scallop population that it implemented a bounty program. The town offered forty cents per pound of the crab. Many tons were removed, most of them to the landfill, and the scallop population recovered.

  Bounty programs can work well, up to a point. The problem is that once the invasive’s population has been decreased significantly, it becomes more trouble than it’s financially worth for bounty hunters to go after the survivors. Most invasive species can bounce back from a tight population bottleneck — after all, that’s how they came to be successful invasives in the first place. Even a good bounty program usually ends up being a cyclical effort that constantly costs money and tries the patience of legislators and program directors with other budget priorities. A species balloons out of control, the bounty hunters reduce it, and then they ignore the species for a few years, until it starts getting out of control again.

  Often, government entities believe they have to choose between a bounty program that pays by the pound or head and hiring salaried hunters and trappers as government employees. The best approach might be to use both but at different times. Let the bounty hunters clear out the species in large numbers. Once they’ve taken out all of the low-hanging fruit, bring in experienced specialists on salary to hunt the ones that had been out of reach. The last of any invasive species are always the most difficult to get rid of — after all, they managed to be the last — and the value of removing the final five percent is arguably much greater per animal than is that of the first ninety-five percent.

  The ideal would be to create a commercial market for an invasive species rather than budgeting public money for bounties. But would anyone really want to eat European green crabs?

  This was what I had to find out.

  The tricky thing is that most shore crabs are pretty small. A big one can be up to four inches across — approaching the dimensions of a medium-size blue crab. Picking crabmeat is a tedious job, even on larger crabs. I wondered if there was a way of getting the meat out efficiently enough to make the crabs worth bothering with.

  Once again, the New York Times stepped into the story. I read an article in the Times that mentioned a restaurant called Miya’s Sushi, in New Haven, Connecticut. In addition to having this country’s biggest selection of vegetarian sushi, Miya’s was lauded by the Times for serving invasive seafood. That got my full attention.

  I looked up Miya’s menu online and found that the owner, Bun Lai, had included European green crabs. Now I was really interested. I immediately decided to make the four-hundred-thirty mile drive to New Haven.

  Bun and I exchanged e-mails about his restaurant and about the crabs. He would be in San Francisco for a while, but he offered to put me in tou
ch with his crab supplier. Oysterman Brendan Smith was catching crabs on the side for Miya’s, and we arranged to meet at the restaurant.

  A couple of days later, I found myself walking a few blocks from Yale University to Miya’s, pleasantly surprised at being just five minutes late after nine hours behind the wheel of a car. It was a little before dusk.

  I could see that Bun had put a lot of thought into the diversity of his menu. There were cheap drafts of Pabst Blue Ribbon and five-dollar California rolls for students eating out on a small budget, but there were also high-dollar adventures in seafood for serious foodies. Miya’s is a place where all sorts of people feel welcome: vegetarians, carnivores, . . . and, apparently, invasivores as well.

  Brendan Smith (who goes by “Bren”) is not your usual oysterman. Bren had a good career in law and worked on Capitol Hill for a while. He could have easily made good money at a large firm, or in a lobbying outfit, or working for a public-interest group. Somehow, though, the fishing life kept calling to him. Even when he was living in a small apartment in Washington, DC, he experimented with aquaculture in large plastic storage tubs. It didn’t work out, and most of the fish died quickly.

  Years later, he gave aquaculture another go, this time in Long Island Sound as an oysterman (there were also some stints as a lobster fisherman in Massachusetts and as a long-line fisherman on the Bering Sea). Modern American oystermen don’t usually just dredge up oysters. Many of them are putting as much effort into seeding oyster beds as they are in harvesting them.

  Within half an hour, Bren had convinced me that the best and most ecologically sustainable food in the world is the oyster. (Maybe the pitcher of beer had something to do with my agreement.) Oysters are the lungs of an estuary. The more of them that you seed, the healthier the bay or sound tends to become. Each female produces many millions of eggs. In a laboratory setting without predation, it’s common for two of the mollusks to produce millions of seed oysters and replace a substantial annual harvest by humans.

  Through the disruption of complex predator–prey relationships, shore crabs end up being bad for oyster numbers. The constant reseeding of beds by oystermen like Bren is one way of countering this problem. Direct removal of the crabs is another.

  A few courses into our sushi, the waiter brought out the main attraction. To my surprise, we were presented with a flat rock as a serving platter. On it was a sliced sushi roll artfully arranged. Perched atop the sushi were half a dozen steamed green crabs, whole, and arranged in a lifelike fashion.

  It looked magnificent. But what were we supposed to do with the crabs? Were they garnish, the crustacean equivalent of a parsley sprig?

  No, Bren assured me. These crabs were meant to be eaten. Whole. They’d been steamed and seasoned with a special combination of spices Bun had concocted.

  I doubtfully lifted a crab, its hard shell intact, put it into my mouth, and started chewing. It wasn’t bad. I half expected a mouthful of chipped teeth, but the shell was so thin that it crunched right down, like a spicy crab potato chip. As with a potato chip, I couldn’t eat just one. I really wanted more.

  What Miya’s had was the perfect bar food. If you put a bowl of these on a bar as you would potato chips or pretzels, people wouldn’t touch them at first. After a few drinks, though, guys would dare each other to eat one and then they’d discover that they’re really good. Eventually, you’d be selling them by the hundred instead of by the half dozen.

  I got to wondering how Bren had been catching the crabs. He told me he’d been able to supply Miya’s needs easily, simply by walking around in tide pools at low tide, picking up crabs, and putting them in a bucket. One trick he recommended was to bury a bucket in the sand with the top level with the surface of the sand. Let the tide come in, then check the bucket when the tide ebbs. Shore crabs tend to fall into the water-filled bucket but can’t swim out or climb the smooth sides. Any baited trap that catches blue crabs will also work for shore crabs, Bren said.

  “When exactly did you and Bun decide to catch shore crabs and put them on the menu?” I asked.

  “Last winter,” he said. “Bun’s always been a serious conservationist and puts things on the menu that are sustainable. But there was something he saw in the New York Times about eating invasive species, and he jumped right on it.”

  Huh. Small world!

  By the end of the evening, I was sold on the crabs as food and was ready to find some in the wild. Bren suggested a nearby state park on the water, where the crabs should be plentiful and I could legally gather as many as I could catch.

  The next morning, I drove a few miles from my motel to the park, which is on the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound. I walked across a long boardwalk over the mudflats that ran between the parking area and the beach. Below the railing, there were twenty or so crabs visible for every square yard of mud. Two species appeared to dominate: some species of fiddler crab and the invasive shore crab.

  A good method for catching crabs here is to take a long string or a length of fishing line and tie a chicken neck or some other scrap of meat to the end. Tie the other end to the railing and throw it down onto the mudflat. In ten minutes, the bait will be crawling with crabs, which will hold on to it even as you pull up the string and shake off the crabs into a bucket. Blue crabs are often caught from the water by the same method.

  I walked to the beach and into the tide pools around the rocks and short stone jetties. At first I didn’t see any green crabs in the tide pools. Then I started turning over rocks and found them hiding. The trick was to scoop them up with both hands, each hand closing in from a different side so that they scoot away from the one hand and into the other. Their little claws didn’t pinch enough to do me any harm.

  My hope was to gather up a good half gallon of the crabs and have enough to bring some home. But I had made a mistake that no experienced fisherman would: I ignored the tide. The surf began to roll in soon after I began my walk, flushing out the tide pools and gradually merging them with the open water.

  I enjoyed the walk along the Sound a little longer. A couple of white egrets paced the edge of the mudflats, probably hunting the same crabs I was. Red-winged blackbirds stopped on fence posts and cocked their heads at me. Joggers along the boardwalk looked at me like I was an idiot: a grown man with his jeans rolled up to his knees, wading in tide pools and playing with crabs. I’m accustomed to those looks. . . .

  Back near the parking lot, there was a picnic area with heavy iron grills set into the ground. I retrieved a bag of charcoal from my trunk and supplemented it with some driftwood. Once the fire was going, I set a pot with a bit of water in it on the grill and tossed the dozen or so crabs in to steam. I had nothing more than hot sauce, lime juice, salt, and pepper to season them. Old Bay Seasoning would have been nice.

  The result was edible, though not nearly as good as the crabs served at Miya’s. Keeping them alive for a few hours, to enable them to purge anything from their digestive system, would no doubt have improved the flavor. But this was definitely a food source that could be exploited simply by walking along the beach.

  On your plate, shore crabs are a more challenging thing to contemplate putting in your mouth than is, say, a lionfish fillet. But going for a walk on the beach or dropping a few strings onto a mudflat is a lot easier and less dangerous than spearing a lionfish. Gathering shore crabs was possibly the easiest hunting I’ve ever done.

  Asian Carp

  Big silvery torpedoes of some twenty pounds launched themselves out of the water as high as ten feet in a fast graceful arc right into the middle of the boat. They smacked into the aluminum and flopped around in bloody confusion as I tried to pounce on one, even as another came hurtling in.

  Asian carp have become a sore point for me over the past year.

  On my parents’ property, in rural Virginia, there are two ponds. I grew up in that house from the age of thirteen and spent many a day on those ponds, fishing and observing the wildlife. I knew everything that lived
in each pond: the snapping turtles and bullfrogs, muskrats and fish, the stonefly larvae and the various aquatic plants. Pond ecology is a tidy thing to study up close — a small system, but often a complex one nonetheless.

  One day in early autumn, shortly after returning from my trip to hunt invasive lizards in Florida, I walked to the lower pond and saw something highly improbable. An enormous fish that looked to be about three feet long was basking, clearly visible, just beneath the surface. Nothing that belonged in a Virginia pond in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains could grow anywhere near that size.

  At first, my fisherman’s heart thumped at the sight of a fish that big. But then I gradually realized what it probably was. A carp. A nonnative fish, which some reckless fool must have dumped into the pond.

  Further observation suggested that there were around a dozen of the fish there. They spooked easily, rolling in the water and slapping it, almost like a beaver would, when I approached. The pond was mostly barren of plants and had turned a brown, muddy color. It was no longer the healthy ecosystem I had grown up watching.

  I asked my parents if they knew where the fish had come from. They asked around, and it turned out that neighbors had stocked the pond with grass carp for the purpose of combating the duckweed, which they thought unsightly. Considering that they owned only a few yards of frontage on the pond and that Virginia law requires the signed consent of all landowners before stocking a pond or lake with carp, what they did was, in fact, illegal.

  The carp had to go; the question was how. The neighbors threatened me with unspecified consequences if I removed “their” carp from our pond. I rather enjoyed the thought of what would unfold if they called the game warden to complain about my fishing for carp on my family’s land, in a pond that they had illegally stocked.

  There are four species of invasive carp in the United States. The one I encountered in the family pond was the grass carp. Grass carp are native to Asia and were brought to this country in the 1960s for aquatic-weed control. They’re very successful in this role; they’ll eat just about any old plant.