June 6: This story is written by Tyler Breen, a 2018 MDP candidate currently serving as an intern with the Environmental Sciences department at Emory.
This year, I have been working with Dr. Yandle from the Environmental Sciences department on her research assessing the viability of a lionfish market in the US Virgin Islands. I am the third MDP student to work on this project, following Kate Groenevelt (’16) and Paulita Bennett-Martin (’16). Lionfish are an invasive species throughout the Caribbean with a voracious appetite that depletes local stocks of native reef fish. Our team looked at variables affecting willingness to try, harvest, and purchase lionfish to see if marketing them for human consumption would be a viable method of population control on St. Croix. Some of the primary factors we found that affect different demographics’ willingness to try lionfish were age and education: Younger and more educated populations showed a greater tendency to be willing to eat them. Hurdles our outreach materials will try to address are the popular misconception that lionfish are venomous rather than poisonous and the erroneous perception that they are stronger vectors for food poisoning than other predatory fish. By distributing our findings to key stakeholders (fishermen, restaurant owners, tourists, and local consumers), we hope to increase knowledge about lionfish, which is the primary barrier to consumer interest.
Emory UniversityMaster's in Development Practice