While it may be beautiful in a home aquarium, the aggressive and fast-reproducing lionfish is wreaking havoc in the ocean ecosystem and endangering reef habitats.
But there might be a way to keep the lionfish in check: by eating it.
Researchers and restaurateurs in Northwest Florida are looking at ways to price and prepare lionfish dishes. In fact, the fish is already on the menu at some Pensacola restaurants.
“This is a question of biology versus economics and how they affect one another,” said Dr. William Huth, professor of economics at the University of West Florida.
Huth and a team of researchers from Appalachian State University are surveying consumers to find out how much they’d be willing to pay for lionfish and whether the knowledge that their meal is environmentally virtuous would get them to pony up a little more dough.
“We knew a market for lionfish existed, but would consumers pay more?” he said. “Would they put a premium on the price of the product if they knew they were doing good for the environment?”
Meanwhile, local restaurants, such as Hopjacks Pizza Kitchen & Taproom, are already selling a lionfish dip as an appetizer, thanks in part to new appliances and techniques that enable chefs to debone even the smallest catches. ...
Native to Indo-Pacific waters, the lionfish is a reef dweller with venomous spines that feeds primarily on other fish. It is believed to have been introduced into U.S. waters in the 1980s and has now grown to a very large problem along the southeast Atlantic coast, throughout the Gulf of Mexico and into the Carribean. ...
To try to find how much diners would be willing to pay for lionfish, Huth spent over $6,000 to conduct an experimental economic market at the annual Pensacola Seafood Festival in September.
“We set up a booth, like any other vendor. But we offered lionfish on a bid to consume basis,” Huth said. “It was an auction system from which we could get statistically valid results.”
Visitors to the booth willing to participate in the experiment were each given a “$10 endowment” for use in purchasing cooked lionfish, and Huth used three different types of information treatments to inform consumers about the lionfish threat. One group was given no information (the control); another was given information about how consuming lionfish could help the local economy; and the final group was given information about the possible detrimental effects of lionfish predation and the possible extinction risk to popular seafood species, such as grouper and snapper.
“We made it clear to them that this was their $10 to keep,” Huth said. “They could use it however they liked and one option was to purchase a 3 ounce filet of lionfish.”
The three groups were then invited to bid on how much they were willing to pay for the lionfish filets the research team had prepared using a sous vide cooking method. If their bid was equal to or above a randomly selected price, they received the fish and paid their bid price pocketing any difference and if their bid was less than the random price they did not get the fish but kept the money. .
Preliminary results, which Huth hopes to publish next year, confirmed that lionfish could be sold at a higher price than other seafood products.
“We found significant evidence that people would be willing to pay in excess of $30 a pound for lionfish,” Huth said. “It appears that they felt that the premium price was worth it knowing that they had done something good for the environment.”
