BOOK REVI EW

Jackson Landers: Eating aliens. One mans adventures

hunting invasive animal species
Storey publishing, North Adams Massachusetts, 2012, xii + 226 pp, US$14.95
(paperback), ISBN 161212027X
Sara E. Kuebbing

Joshua Ulan Galperin

Martin A. Nun ez
Received: 11 April 2013 / Accepted: 12 May 2013
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
If you cant beat em, eat em, say scientists at the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA 2011). This capitulation is one of a growing
number of calls promoting invasive species manage-
ment with a fork and knife (Franke 2007; Barclay
2011; Minsky 2011; Rosenthal 2011; Vozella 2011;
The Stew Staff 2012). NOAA, worried about the rapid
spread of lionsh up the eastern seaboard, has begun a
campaign encouraging seafood lovers to whet their
appetites for lionsh as the next east coast delicacy and
to convince chefs and shermen to harvest the invader
for human consumption.
Lionsh lets, pan seared in olive oil and lemon
pepper in a Bahamian kitchen, are one of the main
courses described in the new non-ction hunting
adventure by Jackson Landers (Landers 2012). Landers,
a self-described hunter, author, adventurer, and activist,
has heeded NOAAs call, and gone beyond, by
publishing a memoir of his travels throughout the
eastern United States to hunt and eat invasive animals.
As with most of Landers invasive meals, the
books recipe is simple. Each chapter is its own
hunting vignette highlighting pursuit of a particular
invader, seasoned with a smattering of natural history
and biology. There are a few themes that run
throughout the narrative. First, Landers is enthusiastic
about tracking, hunting, and serving his own food
invasive or native. He spills as much ink as blood in his
descriptions of gutting and skinning. With many, the
preparation is just like deer. Second, most of his
invasive meals taste just like chicken. Evidencing
that Landers is a hunter rst and a foodie second, the
actual cooking and eating receive much less attention
than the chase, and given the ostensible goals of the
book, the imbalance may help motivate some hunters
to chase invasives but will not help bring connoisseurs
and chefs into the fold. Thirdly, and most importantly,
Landers educates the reader about each species
introduction historytypically an intentional release
by a few na ve humansand the substantial ecolog-
ical impact of each animal he chases.
This memoir will serve as important education for
readers unfamiliar with the issue of invasive species
and with any luck will motivate the public to care more
about management of invasive species. Lack of public
education is a signicant challenge to current man-
agement of invasive species (Simberloff et al. 2013),
S. E. Kuebbing (&)
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA
e-mail: skuebbin@utk.edu
J. U. Galperin
Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, Yale
School of Forestry, New Haven, CT, USA
J. U. Galperin
Yale Law School, New Haven, CT, USA
M. A. Nunez
Laboratorio Ecotono, INIBIOMA, CONICET,
Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Quintral 1250,
8400 Bariloche, R o Negro, Argentina
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Biol Invasions
DOI 10.1007/s10530-013-0489-9
and Landers book is an important venue for increas-
ing public awareness about the causes and conse-
quences of biological invasions. If the majority of the
public were only half as interested and educated as
Landers there would be more political motivation to
manage current invasive species and prevent new
invasions.
The impact of this book on public education
parallels the educational benets invasivore cam-
paigns can also provide. Every time a Chicagoan eats a
carp slider (The Stew Staff 2012) or a D.C. politico
tastes snakehead ceviche (Vozella 2011), awareness of
invasive species increases. However, while Landers
book provides a good read and popular overview of
eastern North American animal invaders, it also
imparts examples of the risks of the invasivore
movement (Nunez et al. 2012).
The books jacket triumphantly pronounces that the
solution for invasive species is to Eat them!, but
Landers hedges early, equivocating that eating invad-
ers isnt a recipe for eradicating, but perhaps its a
recipe for survival. The latter declaration is more
appropriate, and throughout Landers provides exam-
ples of some of the hurdles and serious concerns that
surround building a market for eating invaders.
The foremost obstacle that Landers identies is that
it is difcult to excite the public with invasive animal
fare. He notes, for example, that common carp were
rst introduced to river systems in the US as a
miracle food. Americans appetite for the sh was
negligible and instead of being harvested for food, the
carp were left to spread throughout Midwestern
waters. Likewise, Landers hunting of black spiny-
tailed iguanas on Gasparilla Island, Florida shows how
far the public is from even considering invasive
species as a food source. The citizens of Boca Grande,
Gasparillas largest town, hired a bounty hunter to
depress the iguana population because the reptiles
were decimating their backyard gardens. Though the
obviously skilled hunter single-handedly removed
over 16,000 iguanas from the 7-mile long barrier
island, it is possible the only iguanas ever consumed
were the dozen or so that Landers helped hunt.
Needless to say, no residents joined Landers at the
local bar for his cilantro and lime iguana tacos.
A more serious complication for invasivore cam-
paigns (albeit with all invasion management) is
insuring that mortality from harvest is not compensa-
tory. By all means, Landers is no weekend-hunting
tourist. He is as professional a hunter as there is,
leading workshops, lecturing, and writing for a living.
However, even the talented Landers recounted many
failed hunts. Wild boar, of which there are over 5
million estimated in the United States, are a wide-
spread problem in most southeastern states. Yet, it
took Landers dozens of pages and travels to Virginia,
Texas, and Georgia to nally get his smoked ham.
Landers writes that to effect population growth,
hunting efforts would need to cull at least 75 % of
current adult hog populations. In taking just one pig in
over ve nights, Landers does little to support the
feasibility of signicant population impacts.
If hunting invasive species is a challenge, then
signicant participation of expert hunters will be
necessary to make large-scale invasivore campaigns
successful. This is the case for a handful of Landers
success stories, including the professional iguana
bounty hunter in Florida and an experienced surfer
and lionsh spear shermen in the Bahamas. As
Landers himself notes while hunting pigeons in New
York ubiquitous doesnt mean easy to hunt, and he
thus demonstrates a central problem with harvesting
many invasive species.
While each hunt, failed or successful, is exciting to
read, Landers time and difculties undermine the
basic argument that self-harvesting, even on a wide
scale, can impact invasive populations. The more
adventure is required to get a meal, the more obvious it
becomes that effective management of invasive pop-
ulations will require more than a few skilled and
dedicated hunters. And, once an invasivore movement
creates viable job opportunities for lionsh spearers
and wild hog trappers, will these same hunters be
willing to walk away from their livelihood as popu-
lations decline?
Landers also emphasizes a less obvious challenge
that the invasivore movement will face, legal inter-
ference. Landers is clearly unimpressed with both state
and federal ability to manage invasive populations.
Sometimes agencies prevent hunting on public lands
to facilitate research, which occurred during Landers
Virginia pig hunt when US Department of Agriculture
wildlife biologists needed access to the reserve for
researching boar populations. However, no govern-
ment intervention raised his ire as much as the policy
requiring federally-approved inspection of wild game
(other than sh) prior to public sale or consumption.
Clearly, this is an insurmountable complication for
S. E. Kuebbing et al.
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marketing wild-caught invasive species, and this rule
shut down the attempts of Baton Rouge chef Philippe
Parola to market Louisiana nutria for human con-
sumption. These restrictions would obviously need to
change before any large-scale hunting operation can
arise. Even then, state and federal environmental
restrictions on possession, sale, and transportation of
certain invasives, such as the Lacey Act or the Plant
Protection Act, could inhibit a full-edged market in
many species. It is explicable to rail against seemingly
unrelated restrictions that impede management of
invasive species, but these laws are specically
designed to minimize invasions. It is not obvious that
relaxing these restrictions for an invasivore regime
would be responsible policy.
The strongest argument against the invasivore
campaign came during Landers nal successful boar
pursuit on a central Texas ranch. The ranch owners
were eager to host Landers because of his work to raise
awareness of the damages caused by invasive species.
However, when discussing his hunting opportunity at
the ranch, the rancher admitted that he would never
want to kill all the pigs on his property. If he eradicated
the population, what would be left to hunt? Landers
acknowledges that this brings in a human aspect to
the problem.
Alas, that human aspect is no small thing.
Landers readable and educational adventures will
help humans recognize a problem that is not popularly
understood, but they will not change human nature. In
the end, each chase is much like the last, each animal is
butchered like deer, and each tastes like chicken.
Americans eat a lot of chicken, but is this a recipe for
success? Variety is the spice of life, and if Landers
had wanted to spice up this effort he may have paid
some attention to non-vertebrate invaders. Many of the
United States most problematic invasives are plants,
insects, or fungi but none appear in Landers cuisine.
His foray into Louisiana swamps in search of nutria
was impeded by the particularly problematic aquatic
invasive giant salvinia. The plant clogged the open
waterways and Landers motorboats engine, but
salvinia salad was never on his menu. The absence is
a shame, because the paramount value of this work is
in educating a broader audience about the trouble of
invasive species, but the book fails to focus attention
on the myriad of non-vertebrate invaders.
Nevertheless, Eating Invaders is worth reading and
lending to friends, family, and neighbors, especially to
ones with a passion for hunting or shing. But just as
lionsh are worth eating, in both Eating Invaders and
eating lionsh, the scope is too narrow to bring us any
closer to solving the larger problem.
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