Lionfish, It's What's For Dinner

Lionfish, a poisonous tropical species, have been building in numbers off the North Carolina coast since the early nineties, and now threaten our commercial grouper and snapper stocks. The solution--eat the invaders! They supposedly taste like grouper, so lets have at it.

From the News and Observer:

There are so many lionfish off North Carolina already that scientists don't think it's possible to eliminate them, but hope there may be ways to at least control the population. The researchers are joining forces with sport divers and even culinary instructors from Carteret Community College to see if the critters can be kept in check with spears, nets and tartar sauce.

Lionfish, it turns out, have a sweet, white meat similar to the tasty groupers and snappers they are threatening.

Discovery Diving Co. in Beaufort and Olympus Dive Center in Morehead City are recruiting sport divers for a series of "lionfish rodeos" during the summer dive season, the first May 18-19. Later ones likely will also involve researchers and representatives of the culinary school, said Debby Boyce, owner of Discovery Dive Shop.

The scientists and divers hope to persuade restaurants in the area to start serving lionfish.

"They taste good, and if we can create a food market for them maybe that will not only help keep them in control but maybe take the pressure off some other species," Boyce said.

Happy Birthday Thomas Jefferson

To celebrate Jefferson's 266th Birthday, here are a few words of wisdom from the man himself

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. "

"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government."

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."

"Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital"

"Every generation needs a new revolution"

"I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive"

"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own"