To eat or not to eat? Risks associated with harvesting invasive species for human consumption

KUEBBING SARA; NUÑEZ MARTIN A.; DIMARCO ROMINA D.; SIMBERLOFF DANIEL

Conferencia; 56th Annual Conference on Great Lakes Research 2013; 2013

A popular plan for managing invasive species is promoting their harvest for food. Managers should consider the associated risks with promoting invasives in an economic marketplace before beginning a harvest program. These risks include creating economic incentives that might lead to harvest program participants arguing to maintain a nonnative population or moving nonnative species to previously uninvaded areas. Using invasives as an economic resource may trigger a local community to protect these species, to facilitate their incorporation into the local culture, and generate severe management problems. Finally, harvests should insure that efforts would reduce an invader's population size or growth rate and not be a form of compensatory mortality. We consider the feasibility and risk of invasive harvest programs. We review qualitative differences between native populations that have been harvested to extinction versus invasive populations and analyze the use of demographic matrix models to evaluate program feasibility. There are potential benefits of harvest programs aside from control or eradication, such as heightening awareness of invasive species. However, unless a harvest program is likely to reduce an invaders population, managers should be wary of harvest programs that could produce results opposite to those proposed.