Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (10 page)

“You mean the lionfish eats the baby grouper before it gets big?”

“Yes. But the grouper, when he is big, he swallows the lionfish whole and sucks him right in.”

Spider had been diving for lobster around Eleuthera for a long time, and he had been observing changes. I thought about what I had seen in the water that day and realized that most of the fish bigger than a few inches had been the invasive lionfish. There were some barracuda chasing the little baitfish, that stingray, and a few blue tangs, not much else.

I asked Spider if he’d ever eaten lionfish, and he told me they were very good. Because we happened to have a bucket full of them, I invited Spider to show us how to cook them.

In the kitchen, he plucked a lionfish from the bucket with a pair of tongs and set it on its side on a cutting board. He clipped off the venomous fins with sturdy shears, but pointed out that we still needed to avoid the clipped-off ends.

A dull fillet knife was produced. Spider deftly carved around the back of the head and straight down behind the gills, to the bone. He worked the knife backward along the skeleton from this cut and pulled off the fillets without gutting the fish.

Spider called for some vinegar, lime juice, and salt. He mixed these in a bowl with water and soaked the fillets to produce a sort of ceviche. The lionfish was good prepared this way, but not amazing.

Following Spider’s method, Abe and I took turns carving up the other lionfish. Although I’m always interested in learning the local way of butchering anything, I thought there might be a more efficient way to get the maximum amount of meat from these smallish fish. Quite a bit of food was left on the discarded carcasses. How about if we scaled and gutted them; dressed them with a bit of lime juice, pepper, and olive oil; wrapped them in grape leaves; and roasted them whole, Greek-style? I like cooking largemouth bass and crappie this way at home, usually over a smoky hardwood fire.

Because Abe had cooked lionfish before, I let him prepare it the way he usually would. He cut the fillets into bite-sized pieces, then mixed up a batter into which he dunked the chunks before frying them in oil.

The result was superb. Each piece of flaky, soft fish melted in my mouth. This was really worth the work we’d put into getting the fish. Fresh and hot, straight from the sea and kitchen, this was a dish that could be pursued with the passion my Massachusetts-born mother reserves for fried clams.

Clearly this stuff had promise. Unfortunately, we’d cooked all of the lionfish, and I hadn’t been able to taste it in a simpler, unadorned state. I was going to have to get more.

The next day, around noon, I found myself feeling queasy. Within a few hours, I was curled up on the floor, in the dark, in the fetal position. I was dizzy and had some mild hallucinations: a mistaken impression of movement continually registered in my peripheral vision. I would look to see what had been moving and nothing would be there. It was somewhat more disconcerting than it needed to be, as there were tiny lizards running around, both indoors and out. Every now and then I would look over at my “hallucination” and see a little green lizard pouncing on something next to my head. Well, the lizards were probably there, but I can’t say for sure . . .

Nobody else who had eaten the lionfish became sick, and my progression of symptoms matched up with the accounts of people who had accidentally drunk some of the tap water at Mojo’s place. Hmm. At Mojo’s place the night before, after doing all that washing, I’d drunk out of a glass before it had fully dried. That must be it, I figured.

I woke up on my last full day on Eleuthera to a man’s voice bellowing from the front gate. I pulled on a pair of jeans and stumbled down the walkway, rubbing my eyes against the sun.

A kind-looking, middle-aged surfer named Rat Dog explained that he’d gotten word from Julian that Mojo and someone named Joey were finally flying into Eleuthera at noon, and that I needed to pick them up at the airport. I felt more or less recovered and up to the job. Today was my last chance to hunt lionfish on Eleuthera, and no matter what, I needed to get Mojo and convince him to head for the water with me right away.

With the combination of luck and intrepidity of an old Caribbean hand, Mojo had managed to get a free ride for himself and Joey from Miami to Nassau on a mega-yacht being delivered by a jobbing captain to its new owner. From Nassau he’d done his best to hop to Eleuthera on one boat or another, but had finally punted and taken a commercial flight on Pineapple Air.

Joey was a very young, whip-thin surfer with long blond hair and a perpetually optimistic and buoyant outlook. Mojo turned out to be much as he appeared in his YouTube videos: a middle-aged surfer in excellent shape after decades of riding the waves. He slipped on reading glasses when nobody was looking, but he spoke like the stereotypical surfer.

“Back again,” Joey repeated several times, staring out the car window and shaking his head. These two fixtures of Eleuthera had been in the United States for months. Old stomping grounds waited to be reclaimed.

We drove to Mojo’s place to pick up gear. I grabbed the wetsuit Jordan had left behind and crammed myself into the undersized rubber contraption.

After more than a week of waiting for Mojo to show up, it felt surreal for him to be sitting in the car beside me. By now I thought I had a pretty good handle on what the lionfish situation was around Eleuthera. I knew how to find and spear them, and I was sold on the flavor. What I didn’t quite get was how Mojo’s approach was any different from that of any of the other people involved in lionfish-catching tournaments in the Atlantic.

We drove around looking for a good spot with favorable tide, swell, and wind for diving. I found myself repeatedly turning off onto vegetation-choked access roads, bouncing over potholes that even a Jeep would have winced at, and coming to dead ends or finding that the water wasn’t quite right. As we explored, Mojo explained his approach to the lionfish problem.

“We can’t get them out of the ocean. They’re probably here to stay now,” he said. “But you know, a lot of these fish that are in trouble because of the lionfish don’t need the whole ocean to survive. I’ve got my little spots and patch reefs where I dive, and those are
my
reefs, man. And I know that if I come back every couple of weeks and kill every lionfish I see, the other fish are gonna come back. So that’s what I do, man. And that’s my little corner of the ocean, where we still see the wrasses and the damselfish and the baby grouper and everything else.”

Mojo was on to something. The conventional response to invasive species has been either to shrug or to assume that, in order to accomplish anything, the species must be eradicated from its new environment through a massive control program. What Mojo was doing was something on a much smaller scale that could still have a profound effect. This finger in the dike could be the difference between extinction and survival for many Atlantic species. If a few diligent volunteers like Mojo were to accept responsibility for a short stretch of coast and remove most of the lionfish on a weekly basis, maybe there’d still be places where other fish could survive. Maybe fish from the deeper ocean could come to have the cleaner wrasses remove their parasites and extend their lives. Maybe there would still be a place where grouper fry could mature into adults.

The difference between a thousand survivors and zero is profound, even for a species that once counted in the millions.

Getting people to accept responsibility for the environment takes some evangelizing, though. After a day of fishing, Mojo makes a habit of cleaning his lionfish in front of people. Even if it would be easier to do it right there on the beach, he finds a pier or someplace where a bunch of locals can see what he’s doing. They invariably express shock and tell him that the fish are poisonous and that he shouldn’t touch them. This creates an opportunity for Mojo to show them where the venom is and how to safely remove the spines and prepare the fish as food. In this way, he encourages as many people as possible to eat lionfish, and thus to create a demand for it.

Volunteers with spears and snorkels can do a lot to clear lionfish out of an area. Commercial lobster divers, already in the water with spears in hand, can do even more. Give them a good price per pound, on par with what they’re getting for spiny lobsters, and they’ll be spearing lionfish in great numbers.

This isn’t a recipe for eradication, but perhaps it’s a recipe for survival.

We pulled up to a short rocky beach on an inlet in the tiny hamlet of Alicetown. This would do, Mojo decided. We donned our gear and waded into the water.

At first, the going was easy. I could stop swimming and stand up against the rock wall we were swimming along. But there were no lionfish, so we swam farther out, to some submerged rocks that Mojo thought would harbor some. This was where a very important fact asserted itself: I have no real ability as a skin-diver, and I go swimming no more than once every two years.

I finally understood the real value of a wetsuit. Not only did it keep me warm during prolonged sessions in the water, but its buoyancy also helped keep me from drowning. I was in no way prepared for the physical rigor of swimming and treading water in the ocean for more than an hour while trying to find (and film) lionfish. To boot, there was a pretty good swell coming in once we got past the point of land that shielded the inlet. As experienced surfers, Joey and Mojo had little trouble. I was mostly trying not to drown. The water was deeper here, and the lionfish deeper, too, than they had been during my previous hunt. I could see how practicing holding your breath makes a difference in how long you’re able to stay under.

The three of us collectively nabbed half a dozen lionfish and three or four spiny lobsters, Joey and Mojo accounting for most of the catch. Mojo came up with a trick for storing lionfish far out from shore or a boat. He’d picked up a dry bag of the same type I’d used many times while canoeing, but instead of using it to keep things dry, he put just enough water in it to keep a few fish alive and then filled the rest of the bright yellow bag with air before sealing and fastening it shut. The bag floated on top of the water and we could easily tow it. It was made of tough enough material that lionfish spines couldn’t puncture it (or us) and at the same time it kept both the blood and the vibrations of an injured fish from reaching the keen senses of sharks. Instead of having to swim hundreds of yards to shore every time we speared a fish, we were able to stay out and keep hunting.

After an hour or so, I reached a dangerous physical breaking point. I was starting to really shiver and was gradually losing the ability to keep swimming. There’s no question that spearfishing requires athleticism. I told Mojo and Joey that I was heading back in. Joey joined me. Although he’s a stronger swimmer than I’ll ever be, having roughly two percent body fat caused him to lose heat in the cold water even faster than I had.

Onshore, Joey shook uncontrollably. I started the car, turned up the heat, and had him sit inside while we waited for Mojo. On his way in, Mojo had managed to wrangle up two more lionfish that I’d obliviously swum past only minutes earlier, including one that was in water less than waist deep.

That’s the aspect of spearfishing for lionfish that, ironically, makes it
less
dangerous than, say, playing in the surf. Anyone who lives near an invasive population of lionfish (which now run all the way up the east coast of North America as far as the Outer Banks of North Carolina) is already at risk of stepping on one or brushing up against it and getting stung. To go from swimming in that water to actually hunting lionfish is, if anything, an improvement. The lionfish hunter is actively looking for lionfish, and taking great pains to keep the creature on the opposite end of a long stick.

A quick shinny up a coconut tree (it chafes, I discovered) and a hatchet blow later, and Joey and I were guzzling coconut water to replenish our electrolytes. Then it was time to return home and cook our catch.

Back at Mojo’s, we filleted a couple of lionfish and Mojo cooked them very simply in a pan with nothing more than a little olive oil and lemon pepper. (He’s a fiend for lemon pepper; I counted seven little jars of the stuff in his spice cabinet.) At last, I was able to taste the more or less unadorned flavor of lionfish, without any fried dough or other possibly disguising accoutrements.

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.