When we lived on St. Croix, our neighbor visited his family in Puerto
Rico and returned with a dozen HUGE Puerto Rican crabs---alive. He said
we were supposed to feed them cornmeal for three days to "purge" them.

So, safe in a nice big cardboard box, I fed them cornmeal.
But that night I got to thinking...how THIRSTY they must be....eating
dry cornmeal with no water....so I got out of bed and put a little dish
of water in the box on the porch for the poor little guys to drink.

Next morning....all the crabs were GONE! Having turned over the water
dish which soaked the cardboard....tearing a hole with their claws was
prolly easy!

LOL! So, armed with tongs, my son and I tramped thru the "Bush" seeking
our escapees....and actually recoivered four of them!

Lass

> Try waterskiing on the Missouri river. The damned things will jump
> right out of the water to say hello. I honestly have no idea how fast
> you have to get going in order to get up on the skis but I can tell you
> from personal experience that it's plenty fast enough to make being
> slapped with an airborne carp quite memorable.

That's a major advantage to living in Hawaii - the dreaded flying carp
fish does not lurk our waters and there's no fear of getting carpfaced.
Not that there's any chance of that happening anyway since I don't
waterski but better safe than sorry.

>
> Some months back there was some discussion here in St. Louis about what
> to do about these exotic pests in our waterways. There was a suggestion
> that they should be harvested and processed into a low cost food that
> could be fed to the prison population, or shipped overseas to starving
> nations - sort of a Purina Prisoner Chow Kibble. "Nutritious, and it
> keeps your teeth white, too!"
>
> Or, we could use them in interogating suspected terrorists... As an
> alternative to waterboarding we could make them eat fish biscuits until
> they confess. On second thought, I bet the Geneva Convention and
> Amnesty International would probably have something to say about those
> particular ideas.
>

Good idea. We should think of these fast-growing hardy fishes as
repositories of stored solar energy. My guess is that we could kill two
birds and and a whole bunch of fish with few stones.

> One canny commercial fisherman suggested re-naming the species "silver
> salmon". After all, when "orange roughy" was known as "slime head" you
> practically couldn't give the stuff away.

I was in a Chinese restaurant a while back and they had an orange fish
in a tank called a "golden perch." I was checking out what was a sort of
a plain looking fish and was suddenly stricken with shock when I
realized the thing was the dreaded tilapia in a color not found in our
waters. It made me nauseous but luckily, there was a potted palm nearby.

>
> Personally I think we need to put our best and brightest to work on
> figuring out how to process them into a non-polluting, self-renewing,
> alternative fuel. "Put A Fish In Your Tank!"
>

You are very wise. :-)