How Eating Venomous Lionfish Helps the Environment | National Geographic

Fortunately, lion fish is an invasive species that actually tastes good. On a weekly basis, I'm getting calls from a number of places throughout the country, really asking when the next time is we're going out to go hunt lion fish, cuz they need fish for an event or just to put on their menu. My motive for going out there and hunting these fish is not only to provide some relief to the reefs, but also put some money in my pocket. Right now, divers are really the only way that you can get a lot of lion fish.

I say that, that particular dive at 120 ft, I think we had about 17, 18 minutes of bottom time. In that time frame, you know, was able to kill around 140, 150 lion fish. Went down and basically selected out the largest ones of the herd, and then continued to circle around the structure and progressively just shooting as they get smaller and smaller. Really, you can go out on a good day, get three, 400 lbs of fish and make a few thousand. It's a pretty awesome process.

In some cases, the wholesaler is actually a restaurant. And that's where we're going to bring the fish today. Right now, we're at Pot Rose Andino, which is a restaurant, but they also possess a wholesale license, which allows them to purchase lion fish from properly licensed divers, those who possess a saltwater product license. It's only a $50 license here in Florida, makes it very easy for people to harvest lion fish and sell to their local restaurants.

We're actually going to be frying whole lion fish. We're also going to be doing some lion fish fillets on Louisiana style jambalaya. We use such a high ratio of the fish, we can use the backbones after we fillet. We use the entire fish; we take everything except the meat right under the head. We figured out that we can get this amazingly high percentage of yield out of a 3 in, a 5 in, a 10 in, a 12 in fish; doesn’t really matter.

So, we're paying the divers to go down and clear the reef. Don't leave any lion fish alive; kill them all, bring everything back, and we'll pay for it. Light, flaky, that has nothing on it other than salt, that is very good. In the case of lion fish, it's a very white flesh, very good to eat, and a lot of people like it. Right? Oh my God, if you're not a seafood lover, you'll probably like seafood after having lion fish.