Founded in 2011, eattheinvaders.org is inspired by “Eat the Invaders!” published in Audubon Magazine by Joe Roman in September 2004. When the article first appeared, the response was crickets—and not necessarily invasive ones. But the rise of the foraging and locavore movement in the early 2000s and a focus on lionfish, green crab, and northern snakehead management have brought more attention to the idea. The concept has since been endorsed and reported on by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Australia Public Broadcasting, The New York Times, among many others.
Editor ’n’ Chef: Joe Roman
Joe Roman is a conservation biologist, author, and researcher at the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont. The author of Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World; Whale; and Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act, winner of the 2012 Rachel Carson Book Award, Joe was born and raised in New York. A free-range biologist, Joe has received a McCurdy Fellowship at the Duke University Marine Lab, a Fulbright-NSF Arctic Research Scholarship at the University of Iceland, a Bellagio Residency, a Fulbright Fellowship in Brazil, and a Science and Technology Policy Fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among other awards. He was a Radcliffe fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute from 2022 to 2023.
Joe did his PhD studying the genetics of invasive European green crabs, where he got his first taste for eating invaders while searching for samples and finding a perfect softshell crab. It was delicious sauteed and served on a baguette.
Armchair Forager: Debora Greger
The literary muscle behind Eat the Invaders, Debora Greger has published ten books: Movable Islands (1980); And (1985); The 1002nd Night (1990); Off-Season at the Edge of the World (1994); Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters (1996); God (2001); Western Art (2004); Men, Women, and Ghosts (2008); By Herself (2012); and In Darwin’s Room (2017). Before her retirement from the University of Florida, she took her poetry students on field trips to zoology talks, held office hours swampside, and gave at least one budding poet an A for her bug collection. She is the former Poet-in-Residence at the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida.
Design Delector: Alex Reeves
Alex Reeves is a digital designer from Burlington, Vermont working in web and experience design. He studied English and Film at Tufts University, and started Moonpool in 2012 after falling in love with the power of WordPress. He has worked with artists across mediums such as Jonathan Franzen, Gladys Knight, and Bill T. Jones. Clients have included non-profits like The Atlantic Theater, Poetry Clinic, and Pioneer Works, as well as companies like Microsoft, Adidas, and Atlas Obscura. Shoutout to the original design delector Fred Gates!
