As it turns out, some of the best cooks in the world think lionfish, a venomous predatory fish which is breeding out of control and destroying marine ecosystems in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, is delicious.
The chefs gathered in Bermuda on Wednesday for a competition dubbed the “Lionfish Throwdown” where they challenged one another to come up with the tastiest solution to the problem of invasive lionfish.
“Every chef likes to be sustainable in what they are doing,” said Chris Kenny, head chef on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands.
Photo: Reuters/Philippe Rouja/ RSE
“Lionfish are going to keep spreading, and it’s not going to stop unless people step in and do something about it.”
Native to the Pacific Ocean, lionfish have no natural predators in Atlantic waters and females can spawn nearly 2 million eggs per year.
“On reefs where sport divers are actively diving with harpoons to try and control the lionfish, they actually do a pretty good job,” said Colin Angle, executive chairman of iRobot Corp, a consumer robot company that builds and designs robots.
“But that’s a very small percentage of the ocean ... We needed something far more flexible that could go far deeper, longer.”
Angle, who recently founded Robots In Service of the Environment (RSE), a nonprofit organization set up to protect the oceans, built a machine named the Guardian specifically designed to hunt and capture lionfish.
“We basically drive the Guardian up to the fish, position it between two electrodes, apply a current and stun the fish, knocking the fish out,” said Angle.
“Then there is a motor at the back of the robot which creates a current into the robot and it sucks that fish into the robot.”
The device is still in its early stages of development. Its first prototype, which was unveiled earlier this week, can capture and hold about 10 fish before resurfacing.
Angle said he intends to make the robots affordable enough to entice fisherman to buy the machines in hopes that they will hunt the invasive species in greater numbers.
He also wants to turn lionfish hunting into an online sport.
“With advances in wireless technology, we can actually have an app where people pay to go hunt lionfish and capture the fish by remotely operating the robot,” he said, adding that, if robots can catch lionfish, a new market in which chefs can turn an environmental hazard into gourmet cuisine might emerge.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless