Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (21 page)

One way or another, I had to kill, gut, clean, and freeze the fish for cooking at another time (I had a fridge and a microwave but no stove or oven). I tried again to pierce the brain. It only seemed to encourage the fish, which slipped out of my grasp and into a flowering shrub. I crawled in to retrieve it.

Decapitation is never how I want to kill a fish because, among other reasons, I like to cook a small fish whole in order to get more meat out of it. Nevertheless, out of desperation, I tried it. If anything, the plates where I attempted to cut were even tougher than they were between the eyes.

I had one more trick. Using the back of my hatchet, I gave the fish’s head a mighty thump. It lay still.

Satisfied that the fish was dead, I pondered how to gut it. It turned out that the softer, lighter-colored underside was penetrable by a very sharp, short knife. It was still tough as leather, but penetrable.

I’ve often wondered what the natural advantages are of having a soft white underbelly. We find it in many species from fish to mammals. That soft white underbelly seems to be the undoing of many kinds of animals. Yet there must be some advantage to it, or nature wouldn’t repeat herself this way. The most likely explanation, in my opinion, is that soft white underbellies appear in nature because they can exist in a typically inaccessible part of the anatomy without significant danger to the organism. No bones, armor, or thick hide to waste nutrients on growing or maintaining; no coloration for camouflage or communication with other animals. I imagine that in a state of perfect grace, with no need to fight, run, or hide, most species would become sort of flabby pale blobs. It would be soft white underbelly all around.

After the fish was mostly gutted, I lifted my head and immediately regretted the fish guts I saw strewn over the beautifully manicured lawn. I reminded myself to clean them up later. I looked around for something to rinse the fish with, but there was no spigot. Well, the job would have to be finished under the sink in the bathroom.

I was carrying the mostly gutted fish to the immaculate white bathroom, along with the somewhat bloody hatchet, when suddenly it exploded back to life. The armored wonder jerked and flopped out of my hands and sailed through the air, sending a fine spray of bright red blood and guts all over the wall and floor in a pretty fair impression of Jackson Pollock’s better-known work.

The fish then launched itself from the floor back into the air and against the wall. I lunged for it, slipped, and bumped my head painfully against the base of the sink.

“Goddammit, just die already!” I shouted.

I thumped against the opposite wall and grabbed the flailing zombie fish with both hands. Now I was mad.

“You’re dead!” I shouted at the fish. “Accept it! It’s over!”

The fish flopped out of my hands and this time landed in the bathtub.

“Fine, stay there. Go ahead, lie down in the bathtub and die!”

I stood panting in the doorway, bloody hatchet in hand, surveying the spattered wall. This is when I heard other guests’ voices through the wall behind me. And if I could hear them, they could hear me.

Quickly, I tried to recall everything I’d learned from the only two episodes of
CSI
I’d ever seen. How long until the cops show up? How long will they listen to me babbling about an undead fish before arresting me, handcuffing me, throwing me in jail, and searching for a body?

First the murder weapons. I rinsed the hatchet and knives and stashed them in my suitcase. The bathroom didn’t have to look perfect. Just good enough for a quick once-over. Like the car in
Pulp Fiction.
Then I turned my attention to the walls. The blood was already drying. Not good.

I spent the next several hours scrubbing every surface of that white bathroom until the evidence was gone. Well, except for the shower curtain, which, I’m afraid, will never be its old self again.

Somehow the police never showed up. The best explanation I could think of was that the people next door were too concerned about a corpse of their own to call the cops.

The next morning, for breakfast, I gorged myself on mangoes from George’s yard. (He grows three or four varieties within a few steps of each other. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a piece of fruit as good as that first mango, fresh off the tree.) Then we headed out for another round of net-fishing.

We found another little bridge in the mainland town of Rotonda. I threw the net for a while without coming up with anything but native fishes. Then I found something in there with the bluegill and minnows that surprised me.

A plecostomus.

Hypostomus plecostomus
is ubiquitous in freshwater home aquariums; you’ve no doubt seen them. Plecos are those sucker fish in the catfish family that people put in their tanks to clean the algae off the sides. They do a good job and will eventually become enormous. I kept aquariums at home for years and had a pleco that grew to almost a foot long — too big for the tank. I gave it to a friend who had a bigger aquarium, which is one of the three things people eventually do with them. The other two? They’re euthanized or they’re released into the wild by those who just can’t kill what they’ve come to think of as pets.

I sympathize with that. I wouldn’t want to kill a pet, either. In fact, it was strange to have this thing in my net that looked as if it came from a pet store. The trouble with releasing a fish from an aquarium is that if it survives, it may breed. With tropical fish released in an area as warm as Florida, odds are good of an invasive fish living long enough in the wild to reproduce. That’s what happened with plecos in parts of Florida, and around the world as well.

Like the armored catfish, the pleco is native to the Amazon Basin. It evolved in the presence of some of the fiercest freshwater predators on earth. It’s a well-camouflaged bottom dweller that’s built like a tank and grows big enough to be left alone by all but the most voracious predators. In the wild, some have been found as long as four feet.

George told me that the pleco in the net was no fluke. They’re in the canals and lakes in great numbers, but not much research has been conducted regarding their ecological impact. Because they’re usually not tempted by anything a fisherman uses as bait, you can work a body of water for years without any idea that plecos are there. Also, their bottom-dwelling habit makes it unlikely that they’ll be adequately represented in an electro-fishing survey.

Plecos have wiped out entire commercial fisheries. An invasive population in El Presa Infiernillo, a reservoir in Mexico, outcompeted the catch the local fishermen depended on for survival and ruined the fishing for years. Ironically, what were lost were the tilapia.

I had never heard of anyone eating a pleco. But since my interest lies in determining whether invasive species could be used as food, this pleco would be a meal.

For now, though, we had to get serious about tilapia. I was content with bagging two new invasive species in as many days, but the primary reason for my journey to Florida still eluded us. George suggested that we hit the golf courses, which are notorious reservoirs of tilapia in Florida. Heavy fertilization of the turf runs off into the water hazards, leading to abnormally huge algal blooms and aquatic-plant growth. This in turn provides a lot of food for more tilapia than would otherwise be supported by a pond or water-filled ditch of any size.

George is known in the region for his work with invasive iguanas and for his radio show, so I let him do the talking when we went into the first clubhouse. The guy at that counter didn’t think that there were many tilapia in the ponds there but directed us to a sister course he swore was loaded with them.

When we tried that second clubhouse, we were told that the first place was the hot spot. We probably could have spent all day going back and forth, but instead I explained to the staff what we were trying to do. They were all for it and even offered us the use of a golf cart.

You hear stories about people getting in trouble for fishing on a golf course without permission. It’s best to ask; sooner or later, one of them will say yes. Dress like a golfer, ask nicely, follow the rules (never drive a cart across the green, for example), and never leave any trash on the course. In our case, I think they liked that we were using a cast net exclusively, meaning there’d be no lost lures or hooks to injure humans or wildlife.

We started hitting ponds and canals around the course. (To my relief, we didn’t see many alligators.) It wasn’t long before I hit pay dirt. I hauled up the net and in it was a big, flopping, silvery-bluish fish, which I stared at without recognition.

“What the hell is that?” I asked George, incredulously.

“A tilapia,” he said, as if I’d asked the most ridiculous question in the world.

The nutria experience was still heavy on my mind, so the last thing I expected to see was what I was looking for.

It began to rain steadily. I put the tilapia on ice with the pleco, and we returned to George’s place on Gasparilla Island.

“I’m not gonna eat that thing,” George insisted, looking at the pleco I’d laid out next to the tilapia on a picnic table in his backyard.

Well, I’d heard that line before. Turn it into food, though, and people’s minds change.

The first step was gutting and scaling. With the tilapia, the procedure was straightforward. It was much like a bass or a bluegill, aside from the larger and longer digestive tract typical of an herbivore.

When it came to the pleco, though, I had to do things differently. At first I gutted it, but I quickly saw that in a pleco this size (nine inches), all of the meat is in the tail. I made a diagonal cut to separate the fleshy back end from the front. Scaling it was out of the question. The skin is tough and leathery, and the scales reminded me of the scutes on a snapping turtle. The scales didn’t look like they were going anywhere. Might as well leave them.

Because tilapia is already widely accepted as a food source, I thought it would be a good idea to cook the tilapia and the pleco side by side, using the same recipe, and then do a taste test. I placed the whole, gutted tilapia on a piece of aluminum foil and the pleco tail on another piece. I picked up a mango knocked down by the wind, cut it into small pieces, and stuffed some into each fish. I poured the mango juice over the meat, as well as a little olive oil, then added some salt and a little black pepper.

I sealed each fish in the foil (I would have preferred to wrap them in grape leaves, but we didn’t have any) and baked them at 350 degrees F until they were cooked through. To see if a whole fish is done, check out the eye: When it’s fully white, the meat’s about ready. My headless pleco was about the same thickness as the tilapia, so I used the one set of eyes to gauge both fish.

When they were done, even the pleco looked like real food. I offered George the first taste.

George looked at me doubtfully. He dipped a fork into the tilapia and had a bite. “Not bad. The mango makes it.”

I tasted the tilapia as well. I found the flavor to be fine — it mostly tasted like mango and salt. Good, but nothing special. The texture was okay, but not as firm as I prefer. My attention moved to the pleco. I took a forkful from the bones and ate it.

The pleco was better. It had a firmer texture and a somehow cleaner flavor. George looked doubtful, but he finally tried it. This was the same guy who the previous summer had convinced me to eat iguana, so I suppose there was a bit of tit-for-tat.

“Wow! This is better than the tilapia,” he said.

George agreed that both the flavor and the texture of the pleco were superior in every way to those of the tilapia. In fact, he finished the rest of the pleco and left only bones (easily avoided) and the husk of skin.

Invasive plecostomus could have real potential as food. It can be netted in large numbers, and baiting them with submerged vegetation the day before throwing a net could be an effective tactic. I’ve even seen pictures of thousands of netted plecos heaped up in trash piles in Mexico. It’s a shame the people didn’t eat the fish rather than dispose of them.

The tilapia could also be harvested en masse as a commercial food source by enterprising locals. Two people with a really wide gill net dragged through the water column (much more efficient than my little cast net) could probably net a thousand fish a day. The market for tilapia is already established, and the fish could be sold without the overhead of building, stocking, and maintaining artificial ponds. Could wild-netted freshwater tilapia in Florida beat the prices of Chinese imports? I wonder.

George had to return to work and I had to leave for home the following afternoon. Still, we’d be able to squeeze in a little iguana hunting before I hit the road. I was curious about how the situation had changed since I’d last visited the island.

George had lost the town’s contract as the official hunter of black spiny-tailed iguanas and then suddenly regained it shortly before I came to visit. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had arrived and convinced the town council to stop putting out the contract to bid and let the federal government take care of the iguanas instead.

The previous winter, I’d heard accounts of the USDA guys doing ridiculous things that eventually led to the town showing them the door. For example, they cruised the streets day after day in forty-degree weather pretending to hunt. At that temperature, the cold-blooded lizards retreat underground and become inactive. George’s approach in cold weather had been to take a leave of absence without pay until the iguanas could be hunted again. Instead, the USDA men spent the public’s money and burned gas for nothing.