Pez diablo: “devil fish.” That’s what locals in the Mexican state of Tabasco call the armored catfish that has invaded their waters.
Also known as suckermouths, the species is popular with aquarium owners because the fish eats the algae that pollute tanks. But in the wild, that same behavior erodes shorelines and devastates underwater plant life.
A Mexican social enterprise called Acari is trying to do something about it — by creating a taste for these aquatic terrors.
Sounds good to me. We love eating the Patagonian toothfish (‘Chilean sea bass’ - mentioned in the article) and the slimehead (‘orange roughy’), so why not Acari?
In the quote above, they say the fish are known as ‘suckermouths’, and are good for keeping algae down in aquariums. I had aquariums when I was a kid, and I kept Chinese algae eaters. Apparently a different species, but I had no idea my aquarium fish could grow to be up to 11 inches. (Mine were about three inches.) Acari are much larger.
Groupers seem to like them. While on a trip someone was supposed to be tending my salt water fish and feeding the grouper goldfish from another tank that had a pleco in it also. When I returned the goldfish and the pleco were all gone. It’s hard to tell with groupers, but I think he must have been quite happy.
I love Chilean sea bass, too, and I’m sure I would never have tried it if I had known at the time that it was rebranded Patagonian toothfish, or that it was slimy!
For those who didn’t click on the “Acari” link within the quote in the OP, it’s to a business that makes pet treats out of both pez diablo and lionfish, the latter not only an invasive species in southern US waters and the Caribbean, but also venomous. If the ad is to be believed, both dogs and cats like them.
The Chilean sea bass is mentioned as an example of another invasive fish that was eaten. The article is about Plecostomus (specifically the Common Pleco, a fish that’s sold at stores all the time but grows to be 2 feet long).
As an aside, they really are armored. I had a pleco (not a common one, a smaller species) die while I was on vacation once, and since I wasn’t there to remove him right away the other fish had a few days with the body. That happens in aquarium keeping sometimes and you generally don’t find anything left when it does, but when the pleco died I was left with the armored plates from the front of the animal. It basically looked like the front half of a living pleco - the armored bones are just under the skin.
I couldn’t imagine eating a pleco. It’s basically all armored bones. Sounds like eating armadillo to me. Or maybe shellfish, which I guess people do… hm, maybe it’s not so unimaginable.
Not very big is a relative term. Plecos are enormous when the rep at PetCo tells your ten year old they’ll do just fine in his new 15 gallon tank. That’s how so many of them have ended up in Flridia’s waterways…
I looked at the thread, and immediately felt deja vu…
Largely, I feel the same now as then, that making them into a tasty attractive nuisance and devouring them isn’t a great fix, and one that has a small chance to backfire, but still probably won’t hurt and may help. And the default “If we can’t fix it perfectly, it’s best to do nothing until we have a perfect solution” is mind-shatteringly stupid.
Granted, the article in the prior thread was predominantly negative towards the eating of invasive species (see the mind-shatteringly stupid above), and this one is largely positive.
Speaking of invasive nuisance species, Pennsylvania has spotted lanternflies.. They aren’t in our county, so we’d never seen any.
Last night we drove to Greensburg to see a band at a park. Walking from the parking lot to the park was surreal. People all around us were furiously stomping on things. I had consumed some cannabis and things were just kicking in. I was weirded out, but my gf explained about the flies. We saw one and squashed it (as you are supposed to).
