Rise up and fight with forks and knives
From the The Outer Banks Voice
Story and photos by Jim Trotman
The Invaders were at the gates. So we caught them and ate them. And they were delicious.
It seems like a regular thing that we seafood consumers are being told to avoid a certain species because it’s becoming endangered. If we are good-hearted people, we obey. Which is why we’ve been sorely missing Chilean sea bass.
So it came as a bit of a surprise to be told that if we want to do right by our local ecosystem, we really need to get out there and eat a particular species, blue catfish in this instance, and do so in a hurry.
We recently joined about 30 other interested folks for the “Fish & Flights: Fighting Invasive Blue Catfish with Forks and Knives,” an educational outreach dinner held at Basnight’s Lone Cedar Café. The North Carolina Coastal Federation held the dinner was to raise awareness of the drastic impact this invasive species is having in North Carolina Coastal waters.
The blue catfish is highly adaptable, eats darn near anything and grows to astounding proportions. It is native to the Mississippi Delta and has been introduced to other waterways as a means to help struggling fisheries.
Virginia and South Carolina were participants in such a scheme, but fish are lousy at observing state lines and they migrated southward, enjoying and now threatening the abundant and varied sea life here in North Carolina.
The main problem is, they are so good at what they do, eating and breeding and growing, they have few natural predators. In fact, I have met Blue Cat predators and they are us. And so, the promotion of humans to consume blue catfish with gusto and expand the commercial markets for them seems to be a wise tactic.
We were brought this information between courses of small plates by Thomas Hennessey, an undergraduate intern at UNC-Chapel Hill who gave an overview of his research with a PowerPoint presentation. Hennessey and Sara E. Mirabilio, fisheries specialist with the North Carolina Sea Grant Extension Program answered a bevy of questions at the conclusion of the meal.
Story continues at The Outer Banks Voice
Take a look at a 112 pound blue catfish caught in the Cape Fear River
