Sam Parrish stood in line Saturday night under the rafters of a warmly lit pavilion, looking earnestly for a cricket cupcake.
“Is that the last one?” she asked as a man reached for the lone chocolate-frosted treat sitting in a tin tray.
He retreated, and the 21-year-old UF alumna made off with the last cupcake.
Parrish joined about 400 other people eager to taste dishes with unusual ingredients at the UF Wildlife Society’s 30th Annual Beast Feast at the Whitehurst Lodge in Archer.
Carnivores shuffled past two lines of tables crowded under the rafters of the pavilion, scooping entrees such as deer liver with onions, buffalo lasagna and fried Burmese python from tin dishes.
Thomas Seberry, a 24-year-old UF second-year veterinary medicine graduate student, said the event appealed to him because it let him experience school subjects from a different angle.
“I work on these animals,” he said. “It’s this, maybe sick, desire – ‘I wonder what they taste like?’”
All of the meat was donated, said William Giuliano, a UF assistant professor of wildlife ecology and conservation and faculty adviser for the wildlife club.
Cody Godwin, a 23-year-old UF wildlife and ecology conservation senior, said he and six other students collected about 400 Cuban anole lizards from around UF’s campus.
Godwin said his group hunted the lizards at night, plucking the sleeping amphibians from foliage near Newins-Ziegler Hall and the Natural Area Teaching Laboratory.
Anoles are considered an invasive species in Florida, Godwin said, and offering them as part of the menu synced with this year’s event theme: raising awareness about invasive species.
On Saturday night, Godwin stood at the end of a buffet line, handing out samples of the fried critters. In the pan, they looked like shriveled onion rings.
Brian Gervais, a police officer from Martin County, ate a lizard for the first time.
“It tasted like really, really tiny alligators,” he said. “It’s kind of, like, funky-earthy.”
His daughter, Monica Gervais, tried one, too. When the 20-year-old UF third-year pharmacy graduate student crunched into the lizard, she compared the taste to an “overly fried french fry.”
When he ate the lizard, Brian Gervais held it like corn on the cob and pulled the meat off with his teeth to “get the full flavor.”
“That’s how you taste the meat itself,” he said.
Contact Kelcee Griffis at kgriffis@alligator.org.
Carrol Godwin, 53, feeds her son Cody Godwin, 23, a UF wildlife ecology and conservation senior, a fried Cuban anole, a species of invasive lizards, during the 30th Annual Beast Feast presented by the UF Wildlife Society. The lizards were caught on UF campus and served as part of the wild game dinner buffet.
