Burmese pythons are expanding their territory north along Florida’s Gulf Coast, with sightings becoming more frequent in areas beyond the Everglades. Wade Gardener recently captured one of these invasive snakes near his home, marking another instance of their presence in the region.Snake trapper Seth explained the reasons behind this expansion, saying, “They’re either running out of food or looking for new food, or the population’s just growing so big that they just start spreading out.”Video above: Ball python caught on camera chilling on a pool deck The python captured was nearly 12 feet long, comparable to the length of a car. The largest Burmese python ever captured in Florida was a female measuring nearly 18 feet and weighing 215 pounds in 2022.Andrew Durso, a professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, noted that Burmese pythons are beginning to slither or swim to new parts of the Gulf Coast.Video below: 5-foot python found in bathroom of apartment”I think we can expect to see pythons continuing to increase their range naturally, slowly,” Durso said.Trappers are receiving more calls about these snakes appearing in new residential areas, a development that does not surprise experts like Durso.”I also think we can expect to see more populations pop up in areas that have a lot of human traffic,” he said.As the invasive species seeks more food in new locations, Seth mentioned the possibility of their presence extending beyond Collier, Lee and Charlotte counties.”I’ll be more surprised if we start to see him in, like, Sarasota or Bradenton or Tampa area,” Seth said.Seth advised against engaging with these snakes if encountered, as improper handling can lead to serious injuries requiring hospital visits and stitches. Instead, he recommended calling experts to safely remove them from neighborhoods.
Burmese pythons are expanding their territory north along Florida’s Gulf Coast, with sightings becoming more frequent in areas beyond the Everglades. Wade Gardener recently captured one of these invasive snakes near his home, marking another instance of their presence in the region.
Snake trapper Seth explained the reasons behind this expansion, saying, “They’re either running out of food or looking for new food, or the population’s just growing so big that they just start spreading out.”
Video above: Ball python caught on camera chilling on a pool deck
The python captured was nearly 12 feet long, comparable to the length of a car.
The largest Burmese python ever captured in Florida was a female measuring nearly 18 feet and weighing 215 pounds in 2022.
Andrew Durso, a professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, noted that Burmese pythons are beginning to slither or swim to new parts of the Gulf Coast.
Video below: 5-foot python found in bathroom of apartment
“I think we can expect to see pythons continuing to increase their range naturally, slowly,” Durso said.
Trappers are receiving more calls about these snakes appearing in new residential areas, a development that does not surprise experts like Durso.
“I also think we can expect to see more populations pop up in areas that have a lot of human traffic,” he said.
As the invasive species seeks more food in new locations, Seth mentioned the possibility of their presence extending beyond Collier, Lee and Charlotte counties.
“I’ll be more surprised if we start to see him in, like, Sarasota or Bradenton or Tampa area,” Seth said.
Seth advised against engaging with these snakes if encountered, as improper handling can lead to serious injuries requiring hospital visits and stitches. Instead, he recommended calling experts to safely remove them from neighborhoods.
Golden oyster mushrooms arrived in the United States in the early 2010s. The canary-colored, fluffy mushrooms have since gained popularity as an aesthetically pleasing, tasty addition to numerous recipes—sold in grocery stores, farmers markets, and, more recently, as staple grow-your-own kits for casual gardeners.
But these foreign mushrooms—native to the hardwood forests of East Asia and Russia—come with “great responsibility when growing,” according to conservation scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Florida. In fact, the team warned, the golden oyster invasion has already disrupted a significant portion of the native mushroom ecology in the United States. Suffice to say, these mushrooms are an invasive species.
Their findings, derived from a recent field study, were reported in a paper published in late summer in Current Biology. In addition to recording golden oyster mushroom presence across affected states, the researchers developed a model to predict the proliferation of the mushrooms in the coming years. Overall, it was clear that where golden oyster mushrooms thrived, native fungal communities struggled.
“Even though it’s a beautiful, edible species, it’s now proven capable of escaping cultivation and spreading into natural forests, where it can outcompete native fungi,” the researchers explained in a statement.
The march of the mushrooms
For the study, the researchers first collected empirical data on the mushrooms, including from community science platforms such as iNaturalist and Mushroom Observer. This allowed them to create a map of how the exotic mushrooms spread across the East Coast since 2016.
“It is slowly marching south, which is really terrifying,” said Michelle Jusino, study senior author and a conservation scientist at the University of Florida, in the statement. “In 2016, the mushroom was found growing in the wild in just five states, all in the Midwest and Northeast, but today I think fewer than 10 states east of the Mississippi river remain without records of golden oyster in the wild.”
To assess environmental impact, the team compared samples from dead elm trees with and without the golden oyster mushrooms. DNA-based techniques revealed a concerning decrease of native fungal species, including mushrooms with medicinal or ecological importance, on samples with many golden oyster mushrooms.
While a small number of species still flourished alongside the golden oysters, it was evident that the “aggressively invasive” mushrooms were displacing local mushrooms, the study concluded.
Cultivated fungi escape
This isn’t the first time experts have expressed concern about these mushrooms, with certain industry stakeholders choosing not to deal with them. Despite these precautions, the golden oyster mushrooms are thriving because they are capable of spreading their spores “under the radar,” the researchers explained.
Unlike invasive animals, insects, or even plants, microbial invasions are extremely difficult to track, purely due to their general invisibility.
“We want to remind growers that not all cultivated fungi stay where we put them,” Jusino said. “Once released outdoors, even accidentally, the golden oyster mushroom can spread quickly and outcompete native species.”
Indeed, this “quiet” invasion highlights a serious research gap in monitoring very tiny invasive species, Jusino said, adding, “They’re small, but their impact can be enormous. Paying attention now gives us a chance to protect native ecosystems before the balance tips too far.”
For residents of the southeastern United States, fall signals the return of Joro spiders—huge, bright yellow arachnids from Asia—haunting porches, gardens, and just about anywhere big enough for casting enormous webs.
Joros don’t typically pose serious threats to humans. But their autumnal abundance does appear to be the source of significant irritation for local residents—something that David Coyle, an entomologist at Clemson University, knows better than most, as South Carolina’s state advisor for invasive species.
After years of fielding Joro-related complaints, Coyle and his team decided to officially investigate these inquiries—a years-long effort resulting in two studies addressing the most common questions about Joro spiders, published Wednesday, October 22, in the Journal of Medical Entomology and the Journal of Economic Entomology.
Gizmodo spoke with Coyle about the spiders and shared tips for dealing with unwanted Joro encounters. The following conversation has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.
Gayoung Lee, Gizmodo: What are Joro spiders, and why are they considered invasive?
David Coyle: Joro spiders are native to China and parts of Asia. They first got to the U.S. probably around 2010 but were first discovered in 2014 in northern Georgia. Since then, they’ve spread to multiple states, even all the way up into the Northeast. There are populations in and around Baltimore, Boston, and Pennsylvania. The hotspots are definitely northern Georgia, western South Carolina and North Carolina, and far eastern Tennessee.
Joro spiders have slowly spread throughout the southeastern United States since the early 2010s. Credit: David Coyle/University of Clemson
They are an invasive species because… well, they’re not native to this continent, and they show pretty significant displacement of native species. This is the fifth year of our “spider surveys,” as we call them.
And, where you have high populations of Joro spiders, you have little to no native or weaving spiders of that type. It’s still too early to know what their true impact will be, but we’re trying to track that down.
Gizmodo: Why do people consider Joros pests?
Coyle: They’re incredibly pestiferous, in that they are very comfortable being in and around human structures and landscapes. They won’t go inside a house at all, but they’ll be on your bushes, on the carport, on the deck, and across doorways. They’re also very big and yellow, so people notice them, and we get lots of calls about these things every fall.
Gizmodo: What kind of calls?
Coyle: Broadly speaking, “How do I get rid of them?” Whether that’s “on my favorite bush outside” or “they put a web across the pillars to my house.” The second most common question is, “Are they dangerous? Will they bite me? Will they bite my kids? Will they bite our pets?”
Because these webs are huge—they can be 10, 15, or 20 feet across—and you walk into them to find a big spider on your head. When the adult females, these great big yellow-and-gray striped females, appear all over the place, people think, “Holy crap, what is going on out there?”
Gizmodo: And what advice are you giving the callers?
Coyle: This was actually the reason we did the new studies. We wanted to get concrete answers that weren’t just anecdotal. Based on the cumulative years of our team’s experience, we knew what happened here. We needed to do it in a scientific way to prove it.
Gizmodo: I see. And how did you answer these questions in the paper?
Coyle: I’ll start with what we call the management study, the one for the Journal of Economic Entomology. That was in response to the question, “How can I get rid of them?” So we looked online because we figured this was where people go to find solutions.
We knew there were legitimate spider control products, so we tested several of those. Then we also evaluated things that we just found online: bleach, machine lubricant, hairspray, and some of these non-pest products that people used.
In a scientifically legitimate and systematic way, we tested every one of these compounds on a bunch of spiders to see if it would kill them, and if so, how long it would take. If not, will it at least make the spider leave? Because for some people, maybe they just want it off their porch—not necessarily dead.
What we ended up finding was that most of the commercial products work great. I’m not going to list any specific brands, but if it’s labeled as a spider control, that stuff works pretty darn good.
Other things worked, too. I mean, machine lubricant works, but we do not advocate spraying that stuff all over your yard. That’s not what it’s for. We strongly recommend just using the stuff that’s labeled for that purpose, because it works just as well.
Gizmodo: The second paper is about whether Joros are dangerous, right?
Coyle: Right. We did a series of tests where we looked at a spider’s reaction to, basically, the human hand. We walked up to spiders in webs. We did everything from just holding our hand near it, trying to touch it, holding it in our hands, cupping it inside, to giving it a little squeeze.
And in almost every case, that spider just wants to get away. They don’t want to be held. They don’t want to be touched. If you cup them in your hands, they just sort of sit there and freeze. The only time you can really get them to bite is when you pinch them—like, really aggravating it.
Then we said, “Okay, let’s say that someone does get bit. How bad is it?” We got 22 volunteers and had them get bitten by Joros. Then we tracked the bite over the course of a week and had the volunteers rate the level of pain based on a system used by pediatricians.
What we found was that it was akin to a mosquito bite. So it’ll be a little swollen, red, and itchy for about 24 hours, then it pretty much goes away. And most of the pain levels were super low, like 1 to 2 out of 10.
So the take-home message is that, if you’re going to get bit by a Joro spider, you’ve pretty much got to be really antagonizing the spider.
Gizmodo: You probably brought it upon yourself.
Coyle: You 100% brought it upon yourself. Like, they want no part of you. They would rather not be on you. They would rather not be held by you. They just want to do their thing and be left alone.
And if you accidentally walk into them, what’s their response? They’re going to drop to the ground and try to get away from you and get off it.
Gizmodo: Having said all that, do you have any personal advice for coexisting with Joro spiders?
Coyle: You don’t have to use chemicals to get rid of these things. A broom works great, your foot works great, and a stick works great. And if you just knock them out of their web a few days in a row, they’re going to take off and go somewhere else. I always tell people that using chemicals for something like this is often overkill, figuratively speaking.
Then the other thing is that I’d reinforce that they’re not going to come in your house. They don’t want to be in your house. This type of spider in general puts its webs between big things outside so stuff can fly into it. So, if there’s a Joro spider in your house, that means somebody brought it in there. It’s plain and simple.
In 1955, U.S. and Canadian officials established the Great Lakes Fishery Commission—a bilateral treaty organization intended to root out what was often referred to as the “vampire fish.” Since then, the sea-lamprey population has been slashed by more than ninety per cent, thanks to annual treatments and ongoing research. Controlling the species has saved the region’s fishing industry, now worth six billion dollars a year.
Pull back the curtain on even the most natural-seeming landscapes and there is often a government initiative invisibly maintaining business as usual. But, for many public programs, success can bring problems of its own. “If no one really knows of the threat, it makes it harder, in lean times, to say, ‘Hey, we need this money,’ ” Ethan Baker, the chairman of the G.L.F.C., told me.
Early this year, as part of what many federal workers came to refer to as the Valentine’s Day Massacre, the lamprey-control program was unceremoniously gutted by the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency. Twelve probationary workers—some of whom were long-tenured employees who had recently transitioned into new positions—were fired. Presented with an uncertain future, other longtime staff members took buyouts. The roughly twenty-five seasonal workers who are the backbone of the annual control effort couldn’t be brought on, because of Trump’s government-wide hiring freeze. Spending on federal credit cards was capped at a dollar, making it impossible to book travel arrangements to and from treatment sites.
The commission—which is not itself a public agency but an international organization that contracts with federal employees in the U.S. and Canada—pleaded with local congressional representatives. Residents did, too. In 2020 and 2021, when COVID-era travel restrictions had reduced treatments, lamprey populations exploded. In Lake Ontario, treatments stopped entirely for one year, and the number of lampreys increased tenfold.
Eventually, the lamprey program was granted an exemption from the DOGE cuts, and allowed to restaff. But crucial treatments were delayed, and early-season assessments—which, ironically, make the effort more efficient by determining exactly where to treat—had to be reduced. Across the country, many similar programs, and the research they depend on, are being bled dry, as billions of dollars are hacked from the federal budget.
Of the more than five thousand tributaries that empty into the Great Lakes, about one in ten is infested with lampreys. Every year, crews treat about a quarter of the offending streams. Upper Michigan’s Manistique River system, which has about three hundred infested miles, is the site of this year’s biggest deployment. In two weeklong purges, crews killed an estimated one million lamprey larvae there, at a cost of $1.4 million. (In total, the program costs about twenty million dollars annually.)
To determine where to treat, federal workers must first figure out where the lampreys are. They pace the shallow banks of the tributaries—where lampreys live and breed, before going to the lakes to hunt—and shock the bottom with handheld electrified paddles. If any lampreys are present, they will wriggle out of their muddy burrows. The workers must then expose the ecosystem to a specific concentration of poison, perfectly calibrated to kill lampreys and not many other fish, for nine uninterrupted hours. Treatment supervisors generate a unique model for each river, adjusting for variables as seemingly inconsequential as the appearance of a new beaver dam, which can completely alter the flow. “We were lucky this time,” Lori Criger, a fish biologist who oversees treatments, told me. “It rained right before we got here, and not during the treatment.”
The lamprey-control program is the world’s only purchaser of 3-trifluoromethyl-4-nitrophenol, also known as T.F.M., or, simply, lampricide, which was identified in 1956 at a research lab at the northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. As the lamprey crisis worsened, various chemical companies sent compounds to the lab, which was searching for a panacea. “They would get a chemical, sometimes in a plain brown envelope from the Defense Department or something—‘Here, try this,’ ” Marc Gaden, the G.L.F.C.’s executive secretary, told me. The research team ran “pickle jar” tests: they’d leave lampreys, native fish, and a chemical in a vessel together overnight. In the morning, they’d record the outcome—usually something like “Dead trout, dead lamprey,” or, occasionally, “Dead trout, live lamprey.”
Thursday’s weather radar featured what experts believe to be a mass of spotted lanternflies, an invasive species, moving around the D.C. area.
Since crossing into Maryland in 2018, the spotted lanternfly has increasingly left it’s sticky mark across the D.C. area, damaging plants and pestering residents.
The invasive species’ latest show of force painted the weather radar Thursday.
“It’s going to be partly cloudy, with a chance of lanternflies here in the DMV,” said Michael Raupp, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and the self-proclaimed “Bug Guy.”
Thursday’s radar featured what experts believe to be a mass of spotted lanternflies moving about as they were picked up by wind currents.
Raupp, an expert in entomology, the study of insects, said it’s mostly female lanternflies on the move.
“We have females in particular moving about the landscape, trying to find the perfect host plant rich in nutrients so they can feed and develop their eggs,” Raupp said.
Anything of the right size in the atmosphere could pop up on the radar.
“We typically don’t see these kind of things, but definitely not unheard of, just a little uncommon,” 7News First Alert Meteorologist Mark Peña said of the lanternflies’ appearance.
Peña said the weather radar works by sending out a signal from a site at Dulles International Airport.
“These pulses of information go out, and they’ll reflect back anything that’s in the sky,” Peña said. “So for us, it’s usually used for rain and snow, but at certain levels of the atmosphere, it can also pick up bugs and butterflies, birds have even shown up.”
It’s a matter of process of elimination to figure out the origin of unexpected images.
“We knew that there was no rain falling, it just ended up being deduced down to some kind of bug,” Peña said. “And we all know that the lanternflies are all over the place now.”
In the D.C. area, cicadas have also made an appearance on the radar. Peña said in his home state of Texas, he’s spotted migrating monarchs and bats.
“There’s big bat colonies in Texas, and every summer, whenever they go out at night, you’ll see these big explosions out of these caves,” he said.
Are spotted lanternflies in the DC area’s extended forecast?
Though a mob of invasive bugs might be annoying, Raupp said they don’t pose a direct danger to people. They don’t bite or sting.
“In a residential landscape, the biggest concern I have is the vast amount of the honeydew they excrete. This carbohydrate-rich liquid will fall down on plants below, discoloring them,” Raupp said. “A nasty fungus called ‘sooty mold’ will blacken those plants and actually may harm those plants.”
That honeydew can attract instincts that sting, including yellow jackets, paper wasps, hornets and honeybees.
“This creates a health hazard for people and their pets,” Raupp said.
The population of lanternflies may be at its peak in the D.C. region, but predators and parasitoids are beginning to push back on lanternfly populations.
“Mother Nature’s hit squad will ramp up a little bit and hopefully put a beatdown on these spotted lanternflies,” Raupp said.
Raupp said populations are declining in some areas.
“We’re going to have to wait this one out, but eventually those populations, we expect they will collapse,” he said. “And we’ll be back to perhaps a more normal state of affairs with spotted lanternflies.”
The spotted lanternfly is expected to continue to move south and westward, as it has since the invasive species first appeared in the U.S. in Pennsylvania about a decade ago.
“You can stomp on lanternflies if it makes you happy, it’s a form of retribution, but don’t do this with a mistaken belief that you’re going to affect the population dynamics,” Raupp said.
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There are all sorts of cruel parasites out there, and more are being uncovered all the time. Scientists have recently found several invasive species of parasitic wasps that have now landed in the U.S.
Researchers at Binghamton University and the University of Iowa made the discovery. For the first time ever, they detected the presence of two closely related parasitic wasp species previously only found in Europe. Don’t be too personally afraid, though: these wasps only infest other wasps.
A wasp-eat-wasp world
The researchers were interested in studying oak gall wasps. These wasps invade and lay their eggs inside oak trees. The egg-laying process also generates the titular gall—benign growths that sprout from the plant (in human terms, these growths are like warts). The egg matures inside the gall, using it for nourishment and protection.
Sometimes, though, nature’s parasites can have their own parasites, oak gall wasps included. These turducken parasites are known as hyperparasites, and many are parasitic wasps. These wasps also tend to be parasitoids, or parasites who ultimately kill their host. Oak gall parasitic wasps, in particular, will pierce through the gall and lay their own eggs, which will subsequently devour the existing larvae inside.
The research team wanted to better understand the diversity of oak gall wasps and their parasites. So they collected gall samples from oak trees on both coasts of the U.S., from British Columbia, Canada, to Florida. They also raised the parasitoid wasps found inside these galls in their labs.
All told, they identified more than 100 distinct species of parasitic wasps from the galls. But two of these species had never been spotted inside the U.S. until now; what’s more, they were found on opposite ends of North America.
The new wasps technically belong to the same species, Bootanomyiadorsalis. But previous genetic data from Europe has suggested there are at least two distinct subsets of these wasps out there, the researchers say—distinct enough that they should be viewed as different species. One of these groups, B. dorsalis sp. 1, was only found in New York, while the other, B. dorsalis sp. 2, was found in several locations along the West Coast.
The team’s findings were published earlier this July in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research (Hymenoptera being the large order of insects that includes wasps).
Mysteries to be solved
In science, one discovery often begets many more questions, and that’s the case here, too.
For starters, it’s unknown exactly how the wasps got here. It’s possible that they arrived on non-native oak tree species, some of which were first brought to North America as early as the 17th century. But since the adult wasps can live for nearly a month, they may have just hitched a ride on a plane, the researchers speculate.
The West Coast wasps were also very genetically similar, likely meaning that only a small population arrived in the area initially. Conversely, the East Coast wasps were more diverse, so it’s possible more than one introduction occurred.
Another important question is whether these wasps could pose a serious threat to the population health of the native oak gall wasps they’re infesting or to the overall ecosystems they now call home.
“We did find that they can parasitize multiple oak gall wasp species and that they can spread, given that we know that the population in the west likely spread across regions and host species from a localized small introduction,” said study author Kirsten Prior, a biologist in charge of Binghamton’s Natural Global Environmental Change Center, in a statement released by the university. “They could be affecting populations of native oak gall wasp species or other native parasites of oak gall wasps.”
What is clear is that scientists like Prior and her team have only started to scratch the surface of the parasitic world. Few research groups are able to reliably track the distribution and movement of these types of parasitic wasps, the authors point out, so it’s likely there are plenty more new and invasive species waiting to be discovered. Oh joy.
A dive team in New York state is doing the hard work on the front lines of protecting a treasured regional lake from dangerous invasive species.
According to the Sun Community News, a professional dive team removed 1,300 pounds of Eurasian and variable-leaf watermilfoil from the Fish Creek Campground near Saranac Lake, New York, in an effort to combat the spread of these invasive species.
According to the National Invasive Species Information Center, Eurasian watermilfoil came to the United States somewhere between the 1880s and 1940s, and it’s not entirely clear how it arrived. It spread incredibly quickly, outcompeting the native aquatic flora that fish and other wildlife rely on for food and shelter. When that happens, the fragile aquatic ecosystems in that area are at serious risk of becoming unbalanced, which can have negative impacts on recreation in the area, including swimming, boating, and fishing.
Variable leaf watermilfoil is native to North America, but has become invasive in many parts of the continent because of how quickly it spreads and takes over waterways, according to Texas A&M University.
This particular dive was made possible by a grant from the Lake Champlain Basin Program and was the first time Fish Creek received grants for this effort. It was performed by the Upper Saranac Foundation’s dive team, who specialize in removing invasive species from local waterways.
“This grant expands our AIS management to a critical headwater of the Upper Saranac watershed,” said USF executive director Guy Middleton, per the Sun Community News. “The additional resources enable more rigorous efforts to address the spread of invasive plants from upstream sources — a key strategy in safeguarding Upper Saranac Lake.”
“This is a high-risk area for AIS spread,” Middleton added. “With thousands of visitors and nearly all campsites offering direct water access, proactive management is essential here to prevent the infestation of uninvaded waterbodies.”
If you want to help combat invasive species, planting a natural lawn is a great way to do it. It reduces maintenance and the amount of water needed to keep your yard healthy and trimming water bills.
It can also be a massive benefit to local pollinators, which help humans by protecting our food supply. Planting a native plant garden or replacing even part of a traditional lawn with options like buffalo grass or clover can offer all of these benefits.
Work like this is essential in the fight against invasive species. Aquatic ecosystems tend to be incredibly delicate, so the use of herbicides or other chemical means of killing invasive plants would likely do significant damage to other species in the ecosystem. Identification and removal are crucial to keeping these species contained.
The dive team’s work isn’t done yet; they’ll be back in September for another round of removal, once use of the campground is past its peak.
“Thanks to the support of this grant, USF can continue protecting the watershed’s long-term health, safeguarding biodiversity, property values, and recreation-based economies,” Middleton added.
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Emerald Coast Open – the largest lionfish tournament in the world – encourages restaurants and their customers to discover the joy of eating lionfish
TAMPA, Fla., May 7, 2025 (Newswire.com)
– Live Wildly has joined the Emerald Coast Open Lionfish Tournament as a sponsor to help stop dangerous invasive lionfish from destroying Florida’s native marine life and habitat. The tournament takes place in Destin, FL, May 16-17.
“Florida’s unique marine areas are not just beautiful, they also are the backbone of our tourism, commercial fishing, and outdoor recreation economies,” said Lisa Shipley, CEO of Live Wildly. “Lionfish are an invasive species that pose a real threat to Florida’s natural systems, native wildlife, and nature-based economy.”
The Emerald Coast Open brings together teams of fishers who compete to catch the most lionfish. Live Wildly is sponsoring a team organized by Ocean Strike Team, a group that supports ocean conservation, citizen science, and research through ecotourism experiences and actions.
Winners of the tournament receive cash prizes for the most, the biggest, and the smallest lionfish caught.
Live Wildly is also sponsoring AJ’s Seafood and Oyster Bar which is participating in the Emerald Coast Open’s Restaurant Week which runs May 9-17. Live Wildly is proud to be the first-ever sponsor of Restaurant Week, during which local eateries feature lionfish dishes on their menus, educating customers about the invasive species and encouraging other restaurants to serve lionfish year-round.
Lionfish – which can be fried, baked, broiled, steamed, poached, or even eaten raw in sushi – are firm, tender, and flakey with a mild taste similar to snapper, black sea bass, and hogfish.
But while lionfish may be delicious to eat, they are malicious when it comes to the threats they pose to Florida’s marine systems and native fish populations.
Originally from the South Pacific and Indian Oceans, lionfish were first spotted in Florida’s waters in the 1980s, believed to have been released by home aquarium owners who originally kept them as pets. Because lionfish have no natural predators in Atlantic waters, and because a single lionfish can produce up to 2 million eggs a year, lionfish have quickly spread from Florida’s coasts all the way up to New York posing severe environmental threats up and down the East Coast.
Lionfish can grow to more than 18 inches long and have long venomous spines. They are voracious hunters, eating nearly any living creature that can fit into their mouths, including juveniles of many commercially important fish such as grouper, seabass, and snapper. Lionfish also threaten Florida’s extensive reef habitats by preying on algae-eating species that help keep corals clean and healthy. And lionfish compete for food with native fish species, further harming their populations.
Commercial and recreational harvesting of lionfish are some of the most effective ways of controlling its spread and environmental damage. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission hosts seminars and workshops throughout the year to train people how to catch lionfish and to educate the public about the dangers of invasive species.
“Getting outdoors to catch lionfish is a great way to enjoy wild Florida while also keeping it healthy,” Shipley said. “Restaurants that serve lionfish are not just providing great food to their customers, they’re also helping keep Florida’s marine systems strong and productive for residents, tourists, and local economies.”
From Invasive Species, at the Vineyard Theatre. Photo: Julieta Cervantes
Two imperious blondes haunt Maia Novi throughout her play Invasive Species: Gwyneth Paltrow and Eva Perón. At drama school, Novi is told that she needs to shear off her Argentinian accent and try to imitate Paltrow’s crisp-as-a-summer-blouse American one. (Specifically, Novi keeps listening to Paltrow’s narration of her Goop morning routine, played over the theater speakers so many times that you’ll pick up the inflection yourself.) Then, after Novi buckles under the pressure of school, seeks treatment for insomnia, and is abruptly sent to a New Haven psych ward, Evita enters the picture. Alternating — and sometimes overlapping — with scenes in the hospital, there are scenes of Novi as a star on the rise, cast in some splashy studio production of Evita with a British director who keeps telling her, “No, don’t use that Gwyneth voice or even your normal accent; give us something ‘authentic.’”
The pressure to assimilate (Paltrow) while seeming authentic (Perón) — specifically, to give people the performance of what they think of as authentic (that version of Perón, after all, was written by a couple of Brits) — form the interlocking teeth of Invasive Species, a sprightly romp through the destruction of the self. Novi, who based the play on her own experience at Yale Drama, and her director Michael Breslin (of Circle Jerk) keep the pace quick as the play flits between several realities and temporalities, cross-cutting between surreal postcolonial satire and grim reality, as her supporting cast — a fine-tuned crew of Raffi Donatich, Sam Gonzalez, Alexandra Maurice, and Julian Sanchez — cover multiple roles.
Novi gets stung by the acting bug (embodied by a slithering Sanchez in a literal insect mask; he gives a similar sliminess to Evita’s British director later on) while watching The Amazing Spider-Man as a kid, which makes her disdain Latin American movies and dream of a career in the U.S. She tries out clown school in France and then lands in New Haven among vapid and cutthroat Americans, their eyes gleaming with dreams of landing agents and turning red from all the coke they do. The Americans alternatively fetishize Novi for her foreignness — on a date over tacos, she convinces a hapless American bro that her family is tight with the narcos — and tell her to tamp it down, cut the accent, and conform. Then, when Novi is hospitalized and initially doesn’t know what is happening, the satire falls away: She’s stuck in a ward with a trio of teenagers and a dictatorial nurse (Donatich, also domineering as Novi’s agent, a nice resonance), struggling to understand how she’s gotten there and how she can get out. She can’t remember any phone numbers other than her parents’ (Gonzalez plays both mother and father, in a giant hat and a golf outfit; they’re both grandly useless). She keeps trying to explain to the staff that her behavior isn’t a sign of mental illness, it’s just what it’s like being an actor.
Given that, in character, Novi is obsessed with a forthcoming acting showcase, it’s fitting that Invasive Species, now running Off Broadway after a stop at the Tank last summer, acts as a meta showcase for herself as an actor and writer. In white pants and a tank top, she struts around with confidence, whether as a newbie drama student not realizing she’s landed in a big and threatening pond or as a parodical Evita, a performance enhanced by Breslin’s clever Dior-shaped shadow projections on the wall behind her. But while Novi is comfortable and charming in bombastic absurdity, she can also scale down in scenes where she’s trying to connect with the teenagers around her in the ward, or when delivering a monologue about the origins of her invasive thoughts.
While Novi tends to be affecting and real in those moments — in a way that’s appropriately charged, given her play’s skepticism of the “authentic” — they’re also scenes where Invasive Species tends to retract its claws. When she explores the lives of the teenagers around her in the psych ward, there are stretches of observation that are honed but not thorough, and we don’t escape the feeling that the teens are always seen at a distance. Of the several parts she plays, Alexandra Maurice is most significant as Akila, a queen bee of the ward (she has some sort of Jell-O monopoly) who befriends Novi and provides a dark, funny speech about an attempted overdose. But Akila’s presence fades amid the play’s building mania — she becomes, at the point where Novi needs to arrive at her thesis, primarily a conduit to that crucial realization.
Novi has certainly thought carefully about re-creating those scenes in the ward. Her script cites Spalding Gray’s landmark Rumstick Road, a performance about his mother’s suicide, and notes that “situations in this play that are based on real events and real people should be treated with respect, dignity, and compassion.” That respectfulness, inarguably right as intention, sits awkwardly with the mania of the Hollywood and drama-school satires. Novi aims to use humor to tame the trauma, but the flow sometimes reverses, and the trauma makes the elements of the satire that aren’t well grounded seem all the more weightless. I kept wanting to know more about Akila and the other kids, more about the weird power dynamics of the ward, and less about how annoying your classmates can be. There is a limit on how interesting it can be to hear Yale people tell you how toxic Yale is (and this production is solidly Yale/Geffen-forward, from cast to directors to producer Jeremy O. Harris), and let alone to hear an actor describe their frustrations with a scatterbrained agent. Invasive Species moves fast and intends to please. By the end of the play, Novi wraps up her many threads quickly and neatly. It sent me out on a high, but it left me with the feeling there was so much more to be said — not just about those scenes in the ward but also when Novi approaches and then backs away from further discussing her mother’s mental illness. It put me in the position of a drama-school teacher giving that annoying post-performance note: Strong start, but you could dig even deeper?
Invasive Species is at the Vineyard’s Dimson Theatre.
Blue catfish grow to large sizes, are tasty to eat and can be easily caught in the majority of Maryland’s rivers — the problem is they’re considered invasive, locally, and are a threat to other native fish and aquatic life.
Blue catfish grow to large sizes, are tasty to eat and can be easily caught in the majority of Maryland’s rivers — the problem is they’re considered invasive and are a threat to other native fish and aquatic life.
Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources is urging people fishing in the area to target blue catfish.
Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources is urging people looking to do some local fishing to target blue catfish, which are an invasive species locally. (Courtesy Stephen Badger, Maryland Department of Natural Resources)
“Catch and keep as many as you want, any sizes,” said Branson Williams, the department’s invasive fishes program manager. “They’re really a tasty fish, and we’re encouraging people to eat them.”
Blue catfish are native to midwestern river basins, including the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio and Rio Grande rivers, Williams said.
The freshwater fish were introduced in Virginia during the 1970s to create a new sport fishery, according to the MDNR’s website.
“They were stocked in Virginia and across the country to form these recreational fisheries, because they reach large sizes and they taste good,” Williams said. “The world record is 143 pounds, out of Virginia.”
However, they don’t just thrive in freshwater rivers.
“Turns out they do pretty well in brackish waters, so they’ve spread throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed in the past 20 years or so,” Williams said. “They now occupy all tributaries of the Bay, and even the Bay proper, in the upper bay and middle bay.”
Not only has the blue catfish expanded its range, but also its abundance: “They’re everywhere,” Williams said.
Catfish eat a lot of different aquatic animals, including ones that are important to Maryland.
“They do eat a significant amount of blue crab, white perch, Atlantic menhaden, which are species that have cultural and commercial importance to the region,” Williams said. “Blue catfish are associated with decreased abundance of white catfish, which are our native catfish.”
Williams said blue catfish are so prominent they can be caught in a variety of ways, off boats and by dropping a line off a riverbank.
“People use a wide variety of baits to catch them, everything from fresh cut fish, like fresh Atlantic menhaden — blue catfish eat chicken livers,” Williams said. “I’ve heard of people soaking chicken breast in garlic, and different flavors of Jell-O to catch them.”
The MDNR offers specific locations with large blue catfish populations on its website.
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BOSTON — Amid warnings that biodiversity is in freefall, environmental leaders will gather in Montreal to hammer out measures aimed at shoring up the world’s land and marine ecosystems and coming up with tens of billions of dollars to fund these conservation efforts.
Delegates from about 190 countries will assemble for nearly two weeks, starting Wednesday, at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, or COP15, to finalize a framework for protecting 30% of global land and marine areas by 2030. Currently, 17% of terrestrial and 10% of marine areas are protected.
The proposed framework also calls for reducing the rate of invasive species introduction and establishment by 50%, cutting pesticide use in half and eliminating the discharge of plastic waste.
The goals — more ambitious than earlier ones that have mostly gone unmet — are expected to be at the heart of the meeting debate. But not far behind will be the issue of finance, with developing countries likely to push for significant monetary commitments before signing onto any deal.
The draft framework calls for raising $200 billion or 1% of the world’s GDP for conservation by 2030. Another $500 billion annually would come from doing away with the politically-sensitive issue of subsidies that make food and fuel cheaper in many places.
“The world is crying out for change, watching if governments seek to heal our relationship with the nature, with the planet,” Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the executive secretary of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, said at a November news conference. “The current state of biodiversity is dire with the loss of biodiversity at unprecedented levels in our history.”
The United Nations conference comes less than a month after countries gathered to tackle climate change, agreeing for the first time to pay poor countries for the damage being caused by a warming planet.
Climate change coupled with habitat loss, pollution and development have hammered the world’s biodiversity, with one estimate in 2019 warning that a million plant and animal species face extinction within decades — a rate of loss 1,000 times greater than expected. Humans use about 50,000 wild species routinely, and 1 out of 5 people of the world’s 7.9 billion population depend on those species for food and income, the report said.
“We’re clearly losing biodiversity all around the world. Our ecosystems — that’s our forests, our grasslands, our wetlands, our coral reefs — are all degrading,” said Robert Watson, who has chaired past U.N. science reports on climate change and biodiversity loss. “We’re losing species; some are going extinct and others where the population numbers have even halved. We’re losing genetic diversity within species. So we’re clearly affecting biodiversity badly.”
Brian O’Donnell, the director of the conservation group Campaign for Nature, noted how he had lived during a time of “climate stability and natural abundance” but fears that won’t be the same for his daughter and her generation.
“We have to ask, ‘Will they be able to have well-functioning natural areas to sustain them? Will they benefit from what nature has given us — storm protection, pollination, clean water, food, abundant wildlife? Or will they face the remnants of a once thriving natural system?’” O’Donnell said.
“Will the burden of climate breakdown and nature degradation be placed on the young people of the planet, the vulnerable, and the poor, those least responsible for creating the crises?” he asked.
The challenge, though, will be convincing governments that they should do more to preserve and protect biodiversity and to follow through on their commitments. It will be especially challenging to make the case for cash-strapped developing countries who often need to spend money on more pressing concerns.
“It would be a big deal if a lot of nations commit to 30%,” said Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, referring to the draft goal to protect 30% of the planet for conservation. President Joe Biden has already laid out a vision to conserve 30% of U.S. land and waters by 2030, and then-United Kingdom prime minister Boris Johnson pledged to protect 30% of its land by 2030.
The track record of this convention is not great.
Governments agreed to a set of targets back in 2010 but only six of the 20 were partially met by a 2020 deadline. Some experts argue delegates should be exploring why the world fell short on so many targets rather than setting even more ambitious ones.
“You can agree inside your environmental bubble … and that’s probably what happened back in 2010,” U.N. Environment Program Executive Director Inger Andersen told The Associated Press. “But we actually need to have agriculture as part of the conversation. We need to have the financing system as part of the conversation.”
Susan Lieberman, vice president of international policy at Wildlife Conservation Society, said part of the problem is that, so far, there hasn’t been “sufficient accountability and monitoring” of the goals.
“It’s really important to put in place a monitoring framework,” she said. “Countries need to report. There needs to be accountability … and the targets need to be clear enough that governments can monitor and report on them.”
Among the goals is to close the estimated $700 billion a year gap in what is spent on biodiversity. Part of the problem, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Monica Medina said, is that the world not putting a sufficient price on nature.
“We’re desperately trying to change people’s mindset about nature, and the fact that the things that we take for granted really aren’t free and we need to start actually accounting for their value and for the loss of their value … when development happens,” said Medina, who is leading the U.S. delegation at the conference.
The funding hopes hinge heavily on whether countries reform their subsidies for industries that pollute or otherwise damage the natural world. Delegates face stiff opposition from parties, such as the fossil fuel sector, that would lose out if the reforms were enacted. Environmental ministers also have little influence over whether their countries take this risky step — one that’s been known to spark unrest and bring down governments.
Watson, who has chaired past U.N. science reports, said reform is needed. “We need to get rid of subsidies. We need to draw down the subsidies on agriculture, fisheries, mining, energy, transportation, and we need to use that money for sustainable activities,” he said. “There’s probably over a trillion dollars a year in what we call direct subsidy, direct subsidies on fossil fuel, on fisheries, agriculture, etc. There’s also about $4 trillion of indirect subsidies.”
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Associated Press science writer Christina Larson contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.
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Follow Michael Casey in Twitter: @mcasey1
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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
RENO, Nev. — Conservationists who won a court order against U.S. wildlife officials say they’ll sue them again for failing to protect a Nevada wildflower whose last remaining habitat could be destroyed by a lithium mine.
The Center for Biological Diversity filed a formal 60-day notice this week of its intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for missing this month’s deadline to finalize its year-old proposal to add Tiehm’s buckwheat to the list of endangered species.
The service concluded in its Oct. 7, 2021, proposal that the desert wildflower — which is only known to exist where the mine is planned halfway between Reno and Las Vegas — was in danger of going extinct.
Under federal law, the agency had one year to issue a final rule listing the 6-inch-tall (15-centimeter-tall) flower with yellow blooms, or explain why it had decided against taking such action.
“Tiehm’s buckwheat is staring down the barrel of extinction and it can’t wait one more day for Endangered Species Act protection,” said Patrick Donnelly, the center’s Great Basin director.
“The service is dragging its feet on protecting this rare wildflower and apparently needs the threat of legal action to do it’s job,” he said.
Agency officials refused to explain why they missed the deadline.
“We do not comment on litigation,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Laury Marshall emailed to The Associated Press.
The center first petitioned the agency for a federal listing in 2019. It won a federal court order the following year forcing the agency to render an initial decision on whether there was enough scientific evidence to warrant a full review of the plant’s status. The agency then proposed the endangered status, pending a year-long review.
“We find that Tiehm’s buckwheat is in danger of extinction throughout all of its range due to the severity and immediacy of threats currently impacting the species now and those which are likely to occur in the near term,” the agency said last October.
The primary threats are destruction, modification or curtailment of its habitat from mineral exploration and development, road development and other vehicle use, livestock grazing, invasive plant species and herbivory, the agency said. Climate change may further exacerbate the risks, and “existing regulatory mechanisms may be inadequate to protect the species,” it said.
The agency said then that fewer than 44,000 of the plants were known to exist, and the number likely was lower after thousands were destroyed in 2021 in what agency officials concluded was an unprecedented attack by rodents in the high desert near the California line.
Scott Lake, a lawyer for the center, said in the formal notice of intent to sue to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams on Tuesday that the “as-yet-unexplained collection/destruction events” have eliminated approximately 40% of the flower’s population.
“Additional disturbances within the species’ habitat continued to occur through 2021 and 2022, underscoring the significant risk that this species faces to its survival,” Lake said.
