Lionfish nuggets

While in Belize, my islandmates Pete Gawne and Jay Dimond speared several lionfish, a predatory invasive fish that is wreaking havoc on coral reef food webs. Then, my friend Randi Rotjan carefully filleted them (photos below), first removing their venomous spines with thickly gloved hands, and then checking out their gut contents for fun (yes, that is the kind of fun scientists have on isolated tropical islands). The lionfish was served as nuggets, fried in seasoned breadcrumbs, with Marie Sharps hot sauce, and it was quite delicious.

Fishing the lionfish, for food and sport, is being used as an invasive control and eradication approach. You too can learn to fillet a lionfish in this instructional video, and then enjoy a great meal and contribute to the cause. Interestingly, others are attempting to train sharks to eat the lionfish, and report visual confirmation of sharks consuming lionfish, albeit in a somewhat engineered scenario.

Invasions

I was hanging with the folks from the Invasions Lab at SERC today, and it reminded me of several photos that I took in the Boqueria in Barcelona, an open-air food market with a heck of a seafood selection. In with the medley of clams, snails, and squid, there was even a green crab (invasive in the northeastern U.S., among other places) - no doubt, an accidental tourist.

Small mammals control invasive plant colonization

My research was published in the most recent issue of Ecology. Very little is known about the role of small rodents in New England tidal marshes, a heavily researched ecosystem. Yet I found that these small rodents, mice and voles primarily, had an astonishingly large effect in tidal marsh plant communities.

Phragmites australis, the common reed, and Typha angustifolia, cattails, are major nuisance species in New England tidal wetlands, which are already heavily degraded by tidal restriction and land reclamation. Both plant species propogate clonally, can takeover entire communities, and disrupt wetland hydrodynamic processes. In my research in New England tidal marshes, I found that rodent herbivory has a strong effect on colonization and establishment of Phragmites and Typha in brackish and fresh tidal marsh systems. In caged areas, where rodents were excluded, plant species composition was drastically changed and Phragmites and Typha clones were established within three years, whereas these nuisance species were consumed by rodents in uncaged areas. This research tells us that small mammal populations are a necessity for New England tidal marshes in order to maintain healthy communities of native plants.

Read the research abstract here.