Invasive species becomes a delicious dish

"We really appreciate you coming out." "We have a special story to tell tonight." One of the cruxes that we're going to be discussing is the recent initiatives that Virginia Tech has been involved in with the invasive blue catfish. It's a very unusual situation that we have. The blue catfish being invasive has now entered the Chesapeake Bay waters and the salty waters, and we've documented that it's eating all of our blue crabs, our clams, our oysters. So it is basically replacing the populations in the bay. But in so doing, it turns out that it is a very high quality, very flavorful fish to eat, and thus lies a huge opportunity to create a new and sustainable fishery in Virginia and in the Mid Atlantic. It's a very unique opportunity where an invasive species can become a new fishery. I've prepared a lot of catfish in my career. It's much whiter than most catfish usually is. It has a little bit more of a texture closer to crab meat where catfish isn't quite that fluffy, if you will. We have an amuse bouche, which is a medallion of blue catfish. We made it look like a scallop. We did a nice chowder, a southern chowder. We did an Asian flair like on a sesame tuna, seared tuna. And then we went really southern with fish and grits, man. You can't go wrong. It's a high quality product. We've tested it. It's being marketed all around the world by the Virginia Marine Products Board. It is highly desired. There's orders from across the world for this fish, but we don't have the infrastructure or the processors processing the volumes that we need. And the long term plan is to maybe cut the population down to 2 or 300 million pounds and then target it to where we reduce the impact upon the commercial fisheries that are being heavily impacted right now. As with the other ARECS, you know, our job is to be kind of the conduit between our stakeholders, the public, the industry. And all of the knowledge, expertise that we have at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg to create solutions to, you know, maintain viability of our environment, of our economy. We see that in this aspect, it's working just extremely well.