Past Pood

The National Wildlife Federation has suggested an unconventional way to help control the appetite and spread of invasive species in the United States: eat them.

Taking that cue, conservation biologist Joe Roman launched the Eat the Invaders project, an online public education and outreach effort. Its website lists edible invasive species, including lionfish, Asian carp, green crabs, feral pigs, garlic mustard, and wild snails, TCD reported.

Voracious lionfish, for example, can wipe out native fish populations in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico in just a few years, the report said.

The Eat the Invaders website also features recipes and cooking ideas using invasive species as ingredients.

In Florida, divers, fisheries biologists, and restaurants hold Lionfish Restaurant Week, where diners sample dishes made from the invasive fish to support reef recovery, according to TCD.

Meanwhile, scientists discovered that meat eaten by a mummified wolf puppy found by ivory hunters in northeastern Siberia in 2011 came from a long-extinct animal.

The wolf’s remains had been frozen for 14,400 years and were well-preserved. During autopsy, researchers found a piece of hairy meat in its gut, apparently its last meal before it died.

Camilo Chacón-Duque, an evolutionary geneticist from Uppsala University in Sweden, led the effort to retrieve DNA from the meat and reconstruct the complete genome of the animal, National Geographic  (NG) reported.

In findings published on 14 January in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, Chacón-Duque said the meat came from a woolly rhinoceros, a species believed to have gone extinct due to climate change.

It was the first time scientists sequenced the complete genome of an Ice Age animal using material from another animal’s stomach, according to NG.