How can we help lessen the impacts of invasive animals? By eating them, according to foodie activists.
A lionfish swims at the water’s surface near Cebu in the Philippines. Native to the Indo-Pacific, the fish have spread throughout the Caribbean, where they are devouring and decimating populations of native reef fish. (Photo by Henley Spiers/Nature Picture Library)
LIONFISH LOOK LIKE A CORAL REEF COME TO LIFE. With a spiky crown of dangerous candy-striped spines circling their bodies, they’re psychedelic-looking fish—and they eat pretty much anything they can fit into their mouths. Native to the Indo-Pacific, lionfish were spotted off Dania Beach, Florida, in 1985, likely escapees from the aquarium trade. Since then, they’ve spread through the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and as far north as North Carolina. Scientists suspect their range will continue to expand.
It’s a worrisome forecast because, where lionfish go, native fish plummet. Feeding voraciously on adults of small species and juveniles of larger fish, the fish’s venomous spines deter predators from eating them. Lionfish also reproduce year-round. With females releasing 50,000 eggs every three days, a few fish quickly can become a crisis. In one study off the Bahamas, published in PLOS One, researchers found that an increase in lionfish numbers led to a 65 percent decline in biomass of 42 native fish species in just two years.
Fourteen years ago, fisheries biologist Alex Fogg, now natural resources chief for Destin–Fort Walton Beach in Florida, started studying lionfish, enlisting local divers to bring him any of the fish they caught. Fogg, a diver and spearfisher himself, went lionfish hunting too. Videos he took underwater show wrecks and reefs covered with so many lionfish they look like polka dots swaying on the sand. Fogg would bring containers with him, quickly filling them with the invaders, arm aching because he’d speared them over and over. Even so, he rarely could eradicate every lionfish from a single site. Although their rapid reproductive rate makes it hard to estimate population numbers, Fogg believes that in Florida, “We have densities of lionfish higher than anywhere outside their native range.”
Hoping to put a dent in lionfish numbers, the nonprofit REEF began hosting lionfish fishing tournaments, awarding cash prizes, in the Florida Keys in 2010. Since then, several other groups have launched similar tournaments, often targeting locations where too many of the invaders threatened the ecosystem. Noting the success of such efforts, Fogg and others began thinking it would be even more beneficial to create year-round demand for the fish in restaurants.
The idea panned out in 2019, when Fogg and the Emerald Coast Open, the world’s largest lionfish tournament, partnered with local chefs to launch Lionfish Restaurant Week in Destin–Fort Walton Beach. The event has continued ever since, with nine restaurants participating in 2025.
These days, lionfish hunters are not the only ones with the power to fight the spread of this destructive invasive species. Florida diners are doing their part simply by ordering dinner. They’ve joined a growing movement—known as invasivorism—that hopes to control invasive species by eating them.
A diver spears a lionfish off the Cayman Islands. In Destin, Florida, Brotula’s Seafood House & Steamer serves lionfish (below) during Lionfish Restaurant Week.
Like lionfish, nonnative species that become invasive tend to be highly adaptable and resistant to predation. They also reproduce or spread quickly and are less sensitive than native species to temperature or habitat alterations. According to a 2023 report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), such invasive plants and animals cost the global economy as much as $423 billion a year in crop losses, habitat destruction and extirpation of native species that many people rely on. In addition, UNEP estimates that invasive species are linked to 60 percent of all recorded species extinctions.
Traditionally, conservationists have tried to reduce invasive species numbers with labor-intensive techniques, including manual removal and poisons. Such approaches are expensive, however. According to invasivorism advocates like Fogg, creating demand for problem species as sought-after food can subsidize their eradication.
For centuries, human appetites for wild animals have caused plenty of them to go extinct. The slow-moving Steller’s sea cow and flightless birds, such as the moa and great auk, all were hunted out of existence. Atlantic cod were fished so heavily they dropped to 1 percent of their historic levels and still have not recovered. If more people “decided lionfish was really tasty and everybody wanted it, I’m confident [its] numbers would go down in short order,” says University of Vermont conservation biologist Joe Roman, founder and editor of the Eat the Invaders website (motto: “Fighting Invasive Species, One Bite at a Time”).
Roman’s site lists more than 20 edible invasive plant and animal species, from kudzu and garlic mustard to lionfish, European green crab, Asian carp, periwinkle snail and feral pig. In addition to lionfish, many others now appear on restaurant menus. Some East Coast restaurants, for example, have featured periwinkle snails and invasive plants such as kudzu and garlic mustard. Asian carp, a major threat throughout the Great Lakes region, has been smoked and rebranded as “copi,” showing up on menus as fish and chips or sushi.
First recorded off southern Massachusetts in 1817 (likely hitchhiking across the Atlantic Ocean on ships), European green crabs are wreaking havoc across New England—devouring bivalves and crustaceans, including juvenile lobsters, and uprooting native plants, such as spartina and eelgrass, which destroys fish nurseries and weakens natural storm buffers. Because of their small size—roughly half that of prized native blue crabs—green crabs have appeared on the menus of just a handful of gourmet restaurants in New England. But eating these diminutive crustaceans pays off, says Roman, who has worked to popularize consumption of green crabs. “If you find a softshell, it’s as good as any (blue crab) softshell you can get,” he says.
Roman says it’s impossible to know exactly how many restaurants have served an invasive species. Only a small number include them as regular menu items, but many chefs across the country have featured one-off dishes or special dinners showcasing invasives. Today, invasivorism is no longer a fringe movement, says Jackson Landers, author of Eating Aliens, a book that follows his quest to hunt and eat 12 different invasive animals. “Every time there’s a new invasive species that might be edible, everyone does a ‘Can we eat it?’ story.”
More than 2 million invasive feral pigs damage property and destroy wildlife habitat across Texas. The popular Austin restaurant Dai Due regularly features feral pig on its menu, including cured meat (below).
Among this country’s most destructive invasive animals are feral pigs that either are escaped domestic pigs, descendants of wild boars brought by Spanish explorers in the 1500s or hybrids of the two. More than 6 million feral pigs now roam the landscape in at least 35 states—primarily across the South—and their range still is expanding. Wherever the pigs go, they devour crops; destroy roads, fences and other property; and degrade wildlife habitat. According to the federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), feral pigs have hastened the decline of nearly 300 U.S. native plant and animal species, taking a particular toll on ground-nesting birds and reptiles. Considered “ecosystem engineers,” the pigs even can change water flow in wetlands and decrease forest tree diversity, reports APHIS.
Feral pigs also can be delicious. In Texas, where their population now numbers more than 2 million, several restaurants have begun serving feral pig as a specialty in lieu of pork. Perhaps the best known is Dai Due in Austin, which uses only locally sourced foods and regularly includes feral pig on the menu. Chef and co-owner Jesse Griffiths even wrote a book called The Hog Book: A Chef’s Guide to Hunting, Butchering and Cooking Wild Pigs. In 2025, USA Today named his popular restaurant a Restaurant of the Year.
Despite Dai Due’s success, Griffiths says he faces challenges. One is cost. The time and labor of hunting and processing feral pigs will always be more expensive than getting a pound of industrially farmed pork, he says. “There’s this strange assumption that I go out once a week to hunt pigs and bring them to the restaurant,” says Griffiths, who buys his meat from a supplier like any other ingredient.
Selling feral pig meat commercially requires going through several logistical hoops. Government regulations for meat safety require feral pigs be slaughtered and processed in a licensed facility. This means the animals must be trapped in the wild and transported live to one of these facilities if a restaurant wants to sell the meat. Industrial meat producers are subject to the same standards but can run their own licensed slaughterhouses with deliveries of animals on a set schedule, keeping business streamlined and costs low. “Feral hog costs about as much as heritage pork,” Griffiths says, which is roughly three to four times the price of conventional pork. Serving invasives may make sense for high-end gourmet restaurants, but it’s not an option for chefs whose customers just want an affordable meal.
That said, chefs like Griffiths think there are enough environmental and health advantages to replacing industrially raised meat with a sustainable alternative to make the challenges worth it. The feed needed for industrial pig farming is both land and energy intensive, he says. It also requires large inputs of ecosystem-damaging fertilizers and pesticides. Conventionally farmed pig manure also pollutes local waterways. “Every pound of feral hog replaces a pound of meat from an otherwise broken food system,” Griffiths says.
As a strategy to eliminate problem species, eating invasive plants and animals has limitations, however. For every invasive species that’s a delicacy, for example, there are plenty more that people never are likely to eat. Nutria, for example. These large, swimming rodents native to South America are destroying wildlife habitat and displacing native species in at least 20 U.S. states. But eating rodents is a tough sell for Americans, Roman says. Invasive Burmese pythons reportedly taste good but are not on his website because they contain high amounts of mercury. Other invasives, such as the spotted lanternfly and brown marmorated stink bug, are not considered edible because they taste bad and can cause severe stomach upset. “This is not ‘Fear Factor,’” Roman says. “You want something tasty.”
Chef Jesse Griffiths prepares a meal at his Austin restaurant Dai Due, which USA Today named a Restaurant of the Year in 2025. Griffiths also is the author of The Hog Book: A Chef’s Guide to Hunting, Butchering and Cooking Wild Pigs.
Perhaps the greatest limitation to invasivorism is that dining alone will never solve the invasive species problem. Although humans have driven many animals to extinction, even the biggest advocates of invasivorism do not believe we can do the same thing with invasives. “We can’t eradicate lionfish by fishing for them,” says Landers. There are simply too many individuals; the last ones are always too hard to find; and there’s just not as much demand for lionfish or Asian carp as something like salmon or bluefin tuna—even if you call a fish by a new name. Luckily, say conservationists, you don’t need to remove every single invasive plant or animal to provide a lifeline for native species. “Reducing the population is still ecologically meaningful,” Landers says.
Research published in Ecological Applications in 2014 supports that conviction. In an experiment conducted on 24 patch reefs off the Bahamas over 18 months, scientists found that reducing lionfish numbers correlated with a 50 to 70 percent increase in native fish biomass—the same result that followed complete eradication. Roman says that a strong market for lionfish on restaurant menus will help conservationists both attain and maintain that critical goal of what scientists consider “functional extinction.”
At the same time, restaurant patrons will get a good meal. Every time Fogg harvests lionfish, he’s easily able to sell it locally because demand is so high. When he and his associates organized the first Lionfish Restaurant Week, they convinced restaurants to get on board by offering them 20 to 30 pounds of filleted lionfish for free. Even though chefs had received the fish at no cost, Fogg suggested it be priced like grouper—a species that commands premium prices. The restaurants sold out of their lionfish dishes every night.
Read about writer Tove Danovich.
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