By Salam Rajesh
There are stories galore on how State agencies, and scientists, are devising innovative strategies in encouraging people to participate in the removal of invasive alien species of fishes and plants from the terrestrial landscapes and the traditional waters around the world.
United States experience
See this story from Florida in the United States. A report posted on 19 October earlier this week, says Florida organized a massive Lionfish (Pterois volitans) hunt during the annual Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) Lionfish Challenge, drawing 533 enthusiastic registered participants in this fun-filled, challenging competition.
At the conclusion of the competition, which ran from 22 May up to 14 September earlier this year, the participants dived into the sea to remove 36,187 invasive lionfish from Florida’s state waters.
The divers, logging 1,468 dive trips, broke the record catch of 30,000 lionfish in 2025. According to FWC Chairman Rodney Barreto, the record-breaking success of the Lionfish Challenge demonstrated the powerful conservation impact of collective action, noting that removing the invasive fish helps reduce pressure on native marine species and in protecting Florida’s marine ecosystems.
Lionfish are venomous marine ray-finned fish of the genus Pterois and are native to the coral reefs of the Indo-Pacific, and have since been established in western Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. The fish reproduce quickly, compete with native species for food and habitat, and have no natural predators in the waters they have invaded.
This resounds fairly similar with the observation on proliferation of the invasive alien fish species Tilapia in Manipur’s traditional waters. Introduced for commercial farming, Tilapia (Tunghanbi in the vernacular, both Oreochromis mossambicus and Oreochromis niloticus) has since spread widely across the water bodies in the State, and even reaching the uplands with its widespread introduction in fish culture ponds.
The FWC encourages divers, anglers and commercial harvesters to remove the lionfish. The challenge is part of FWC’s broader lionfish outreach and removal efforts. FWC’s Reef Rangers site offers information about lionfish, the statewide program and ways to get involved. Manipur’s state administrators need to have a peek in FWC’s innovative ways to remove the invasive lionfish to do a similar job with much of the IAS fish species back home.
India experience
Now, talk of the lantana craft in Gujarat. Sometime back, ATREE and LCC-MM Hills initiated an innovative lantana crafting workshop for locals living near Gir National Park in Gujarat. The lantana utilization project was aimed in addressing the issue of proliferation of Lantana camara in the deciduous forests of Gir. Lantana is cited as one of the worst land-based invasive alien plant species in the world.
The initiative was taken up as an example with innovative approach in achieving the dual objective of creating livelihood opportunity for the local communities and in promoting ecological restoration. The elephant statue lantana craft by the Gujarati workers are now praised worldwide.
Manipur experience
Sharing a story from Manipur’s Kha-Sanjenbam village under Nambol assembly constituency, the women here have found an innovative, good use of the invasive alien aquatic plant species, water lettuce (Kangjao, Pistia stratoites) which since have proved to be another nuisance aquatic plant other than the water hyacinth (Kabo-kang, Pontederia crassipes) in Manipur’s traditional waters.
The women informed that the water lettuce is a good feed for their poultry. Picked from the water the roots are first removed carefully. Handling the roots with bare hands becomes quite itchy. The leaves are then chopped into small bits, mixed with cooked rice and are fed to the poultry. As the women says, the ducks and the hen like the feed very much.
So, when and if people start harvesting the invasive water lettuce left and right, its contiguous spread would be fairly checked. Perhaps another innovative strategy is required for the invasive alien aquatic plant species water hyacinth, one of the world’s worst IAS.
What is an IAS?
Invasive alien species (IAS) are one of the leading drivers of biodiversity loss globally, contributing to species extinctions, ecosystem degradation, and significant economic and social impacts. They (the IAS) threaten food and water security, human and animal health, and undermine efforts to achieve global biodiversity and sustainable development goals (IUCN Invasive Alien Species Strategy, April 2026).
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s 20-year Strategic Vision ‘Unite for Nature’ identifies that responding to IAS is one of IUCN’s core existing conservation actions that needs scaling up. It states that over the next 20 years, IUCN will continue to use its world-leading data, knowledge and guidance to support policies, plans and their implementation to prevent the introduction and manage the impacts of invasive alien species.
On a similar footnote, India’s National Biodiversity Authority had listed several plant and fish species that requires to be checked immediately from their further spread, and to be duly removed for their ferocity as invasive alien species troubling India’s inland freshwaters and as potential threats to the country’s native floral and faunal species.
Food for Thought
Emmanuel Nwankwo and Axel Rossberg in their paper, ‘Widespread slowdown in short-term species turnover despite accelerating climate change’, notes that temporal species turnover, that is, the ongoing replacement of the species forming an ecological community over time, is a widely observed ecological phenomenon (Nature Communications/03 February, 2026).
The problem is that this short term species turnover in critical natural ecosystems can lead to tremendous changes in the ecological profile of land and wetlands ecosystems, as in Manipur which is part of the bio-sensitive Indo-Burma Biodiversity Hotspot, with the fear of losing native plant and fish species of food, medicinal and cultural values.
[The author is a member of IUCN CEESP (Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy)]
