Wrong thread.
My city has garlic mustard pulls every spring, and people who say they are taking it home to eat it are allowed to do so, as long as they bring their own containers. My brother, who lives outside town, found some on his property, and his town has a designated dumpster at the recycle plant just for this; they take it to the incinerator and burn it. He wasn’t interested in eating it.
I’ve also seen references to Asian carp, which are an invasive species in some Illinois rivers, and AFAIK they do not require a license to fish for it nor do they have limits.
In Finland you can pick up any plants and mushrooms that are not on the endangered lists on public lands and on private lands that are not in the home range or under cultivation. If you’ve found to pick up an endangered species you get prosecuted. Ignorance is no excuse.
For example Helsinki has cultivated flowers to pick eg. public cultivations are not off limits. Helsinki Univestity’s test cultivations used to be quite near the center of Helsinki and they had signs that said “Please don’t disturb these.” People normally would not but drunken students… Now they are places where people normally would not wander. The finnish saying is “behind god’s back.”
“I’m gonna destroy it at home.”
Are Asian carp good eatin’? I don’t think I’ve ever heard whether they are or not.
Unfortunately the scourge of the Great Lakes and other inland lakes around here, zebra mussels, are not palatable for eating.
ETA: Apparently Asian carp are tasty:
The main argument around eating invasives is that people might start to like them too much. Enough that they begin to oppose eradication and even maybe cultivate or encourage wild growth.
That’s what happened with wild boars in Hawaii. Though it seems like we should be able to make the distinction that crabs are just crabs, and boars are an important source of naturally occurring ham. I can’t imagine anyone getting nostalgic over granny’s Christmas crab roast, it’s just a different category of food.
From your link, here is the issue:
these fish have a series of Y-shaped bones running through their middle, which makes them notoriously difficult to process into the kind of products that Americans are used to eating, like fish sticks, fish patties, and boneless fillets
The article also highlights the company ‘FIn Gourmet’, which supposedly found a technique for getting around that problem and processing boneless fillets.
All of the anglers I’ve ever known have said that carp tastes terrible. Though I’m not sure if the “Asian carp” that are so much in the news are the same species that we’ve had around for ages (carp in general is invasive, and from Asia).
They may not personally like them that much, but there may be a lucrative market in catching and exporting them to places that don’t have the same tastes.
This argument against encouraging people from getting comfortable/reliant on invasives is a well-supported one, IMO - locally, there’s the case of prickly pears being actively propagated for their fruit even though they’re horribly invasive and it’s illegal to do so. But commercial products using prickly pear fruit can be found on shelves easily enough.
I can feel nostalgic about snow crab legs. They used to be a special treat for me at Red Lobster.
Crab bacon would change everything.
Hand-sized? You must have big hands, or you’re seeing smaller lionfish than I’ve seen while diving.
The problems with hunting lionfish, as I understand them, are
- as you note, they’re venomous, so have to be handled with care
- swimming around with a bunch of speared anything tends to attract sharks
- while lionfish do often hang out in the shallows, they also go too deep for divers to get them all. Current eradication efforts are turning toward ROVs.
On the plus side, it’s just the spines that are venomous; cut those off and the meat is quite tasty and marketable
I think you must like ham more than I, and crab less. Crab is delicious. I go to lengths to get crab. Ham is just a meat that I usually don’t buy.
At any rate, I think there are economically important markets for crab everyplace it is common enough to support that. So I think:
people might start to like them too much. Enough that they begin to oppose eradication and even maybe cultivate or encourage wild growth.
is a real consideration.
Yes. I just splurged and bought a bunch of King crab for dinner last night. Man that stuff is getting expensive, but still worth it. Crab for me rivals lobster in deliciousness; not sure which I would choose if I had to choose only one or the other for the rest of my life.
I haven’t had king crab in over a decade. I prefer our local Dungeness crabs. Lobster? Cold-water (‘Maine’ lobsters, with the claws) are ‘meh’. Spiny lobsters (warm-water, without claws) are much, much better. Better than Dungeness crabs. But just try to find them! 
I do like Dungeness a lot, maybe not more than king but it’s close. But for some reason it doesn’t seem to be readily available in stores here in Michigan lately.
Don’t think I ever had a spiny lobster. Interesting that you say it’s much better than Maine lobster, I always though Maine was the superior lobster. I’ll keep an eye out out for spiny lobster and try to find out for myself!
Not my experience at all. I’ve never had a warm-water lobster than was better than “meh” but I’ve had superb cold-water lobster.
Both lobster and crab are best when cooked and eaten fresh, close to where they live. So I prefer lobster in the Northeast, dungeness crab in the Northwest, and i don’t bother inland or in the south. (I don’t think I’ve had Maryland crab fresh. It tends to be prepared with more spice than i like. And there’s a Florida crab i ought to try in Florida, but i haven’t. It travels well for crab, so maybe it’s good fresh.)
The only warm water lobster I’ve had fresh was in South Africa, and i only had it once. It’s possible i just got it from a mediocre place, and it can be as good as cold water lobster. But as served in the US, it’s not very good, in my experience.
Good luck. I think those giant lobster tails that cost like $36/pound (Australian lobster tails?) you see at the fishmongers sre warm-water lobsters; but I’ve never seen them fresh in stores, nor in restaurants on the West Coast. When I was a kid in San Diego, mom and her boyfriend would fly his plane down to Baja and bring some back. When my wife and I went to Puerto Rico a few years ago, we were in lobster heaven. Ostra Cosa, in Old San Juan, had large spiny lobsters in a tank. Just split and grilled, or stuffed with seafood in a white sauce (and topped with oysters on the half-shell), the were delicious! We’re hoping to get down to Puerto Nuevo eventually. It’s a shorter flight than Puerto Rico, or we could drive there.
We have spiny lobster in southern California, and divers like to hunt them. It’s almost impossible to buy them, though, because China outbids the local shops and restaurants, so the commercial harvest mostly goes overseas.