I received this article via e-mail. I tried posting the link itself, but couldn’t get it to work (no netscape on my computer). Here is the text, but alas no pictures copied over. It is pretty long, but interesting. I think I’m going to buy stock in kevlar helmets. Anyway, FYI.
Asian carp swimming, eating their way toward Great Lakes
Bob von Sternberg, Star Tribune
Published June 22, 2003 CARP22
UTICA, ILL. — The 20-foot flat-bottomed johnboat roared up the Illinois River at 30 miles per hour, leaving a roiling brown wake. Suddenly, the water exploded.
Twenty pounds of fat, silvery carp shot into the air, twisting 5 feet above the river’s surface before slamming back into the water.
“Watch out — south of here, they wham right into the boat or jump in,” said Nate Caswell, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who was driving the boat.
Neither happened on this trip, but for the next 15 minutes, dozens of the ugly, hulking Asian carp performed their odd airborne ritual, flipping, leaping and skipping across the water.
“They freak out at the slightest disturbance, but nobody knows why,” Caswell said. “We want to keep them out of the Great Lakes if we can, but the fact is they’re on the way.”
It’s not just fish that are freaking out these days. The carp have worked scientists, resource managers and politicians into a frenzy.
Throughout the Great Lakes basin and along the Mississippi River, officials and researchers are desperately trying to fashion a way to stop the species’ advance.
The beasts have made their way upriver for more than a decade and are now less than 50 miles from Chicago’s Lake Michigan lakefront, held back by an electrified “dam.”
The carps’ voracious eating habits (one fish eats half its body weight per day) and breeding habits (they’re also known as “river rabbits”) could wipe out the base of the Great Lakes’ food chain. Beyond the ecological disaster that they would wreak, the carp could devastate the lakes’ $4.5 billion commercial and sport fisheries.
Add to that the grotesque spectacle that has been captured on videotape several times: Flying carp slamming into boaters, crashing into boats and flopping wildly in hulls.
“I’ve been hit by them — everyone in my crew has been,” said Caswell, who has been monitoring the carp for a year. “One of these days, some boater going 50-60 miles an hour is going to take a 10-pound carp to the noggin, get knocked out of the boat and drown.”
Pam Thiel, who supervises the carp project on the Illinois River, said such spectacles “seem like slapstick humor, but it’s really black humor when you realize what these carp could do to the Great Lakes.”
The carp are the most recent poster child in a widespread battle against invasive, non-native species, which federal officials estimate cause $137 billion in economic losses nationwide every year. More than 160 of these species have invaded the Great Lakes; a similar number have moved into the Mississippi River. They include such varying species as sea lampreys and zebra mussels.
But most Minnesotans haven’t heard of the Asian carp, much less been alarmed by their approach.
“I’ve been talking about these things for several years, but not a whole lot of people are paying a lot of attention,” said Jay Rendall, exotic species program coordinator for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. “When they do start showing up here, they will.”
Four species of Asian carp — grass, silver, black and bighead — were imported into the United States in the 1970s by southern aquaculture operators who were using them to clean up fish farm waste and aquatic plants from the bottoms of their ponds. Then, they got out “through the accidental and intentional, legal and illegal release,” said a Fish and Wildlife Service bulletin.
They began moving north, up the Mississippi and its tributaries, piling up below dams, crowding out other fish species and filling commercial fishing nets so full that the nets couldn’t be lifted.
They have become so ubiquitous in the river’s lower reaches that when a fish kill of undetermined origin occurred four years ago on the Mississippi in Illinois, biologists discovered that 97 percent of the fish were Asian carp.
“On the ecological side, they just outcompete native fish,” Rendall said. “They filter up so much zooplankton, there’s not going to be much left for the native species to eat.”
Confronting a specter of a devastated Great Lakes fishery that would become, in effect, a vast carp farm, governments of both the United States and Canada have poured more than $1 million into heading off disaster.
Last month, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley convened the Aquatic Invasive Species Summit, a gathering of nearly 70 scientists, engineers and biologists who are trying to get carp under control. “The longer you put off solving a problem, the more it costs you in the long run,” Daley said. “An aggressive solution to a problem is always cheaper than repairing the damage later.”
Dennis L. Schornack, the chairman of the U.S. section of the International Joint Commission, which manages water bodies along the U.S.-Canadian border, called invasive species “the No. 1 threat to both the ecology and the economy of the Great Lakes.”
Thiel said the issue has received high-profile support “because this could cost big bucks, and people like Mayor Daley realize that.”
The Great Lakes’ last line of defense against the carp is an electrified “dam” that has been installed in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal about 25 miles from Lake Michigan. The canal was originally the Chicago River, which dumped raw sewage into the lake. It was re-engineered in 1900 to flow the opposite way, connecting it to the Illinois River’s drainage.
That inadvertently gave the carp and other, more benign, species a portal into the Great Lakes.
“Connecting the two had major implications for the whole mid-continent that no one could forsee,” Thiel said.
Since the electric barrier was switched on in April 2002, it has apparently done its job of repelling carp. But it has an expected lifetime of only three years, and federal officials are scrambling to beef up its reliability and build a permanent replacement.
Although carp have been found within a few miles of the barrier, the main advance remains farther away, according to the results of an annual survey of the Illinois River that was conducted earlier this month.
“We didn’t get them any closer than 21 miles from the barrier,” said Thiel, who supervised what was dubbed a carp corral. “But they were more numerous where we were netting them.”
A 14-boat armada carrying nearly 50 fishery biologists criss-crossed about 100 miles of the Illinois River for a week, repeatedly setting gillnets and recording their unwanted catches.
Thiel spent one morning with Caswell and fellow biologist Eric Leis on a stretch of the river centered on Starved Rock State Park. Although the biologists had had a 15-carp haul the day before, pickings were slim.
“Well, that bites,” Caswell said as he pulled in a nearly empty net.
“I guess we solved the problem — we’ve caught all of them,” Leis said.
By morning’s end, they had hauled in only four carp, which were tossed into an oversized cooler.
After being tested for diseases and pathogens, the fish would be “bled out and deep-sixed,” Caswell said. “They stink so bad there’s not a Dumpster around here that would take them.”
Marveling at their bloated ugliness, he described the fish as “like salmon from Bizarro World. In a postapocalyptic world, all you’ll have left is cockroaches — and carp.”
Bob von Sternberg is at [email protected].
Will we ever learn not to bring foreign species to our freshwater treasures? 
or carry one of them cool gaff’s loaded with .44 mag shots that they use to subdue them big halibut things. Otherwise i’m all for KwikStik’s idea about the shotgun thing. Who wouldn’t love blastin harmfully invasive fish! I suppose there would be some legalities to be worked out though.. 
