They are extremely fast breeders, produce lots of offspring, and suck up all the plankton other fish need to survive. They eat as much as twenty percent of their body weight in a day.
And if that isn’t bad enough, they can kill you. There are two species of these things.
The bighead carp is bigger and uglier, but the silver carp can be deadly. They like to jump, especially if startled, by an outboard motor, for example.
Just think how much you would like to be hit in the face by a fast-moving fifty pound fish. Boaters on the Mississippi River have had jaws broken and faces ripped up. In some places, people have taken to wearing helmets at all times.
These fish like deep and cold waters, and from their point of view, the Great Lakes would be an ideal habitat. From ours, it would be an environmental disaster. But they will be here soon, if we don’t take decisive action, right away.
You are hearing a lot about Asian carp now, not because they’ve just been discovered, but in part thanks to partisan politics. Last week, Gov. Granholm and Lt. Gov. Cherry sent an open letter to Attorney General Mike Cox, urging him to “pursue every legal tool available” to stop the carp from invading Lake Michigan.
They don’t really think Cox is a carp sympathizer, but Cherry is running for governor next year, and Cox is a likely opponent.
This came after the Army Corps of Engineers revealed last month that Asian carp DNA had been found within eight miles of Lake Michigan. The fish are in the Mississippi and have been working their way north, but were supposed to be stopped by an electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.
But evidently, some shock-resistant carp seem to have gotten through. Actually, experts have been predicting this might happen for many years, but nobody wanted to think about it. Most of the invasive species ruining the Great Lakes have come over in the ballast water of ocean-going freighters. But the carp came from the south.
Many years ago, an Arkansas fish farmer decided to import and raise them. Then there was flooding, and the carp got into the Mississippi, and have been working their way north ever since.
According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, there now appears to be nothing between the “ecosystem-ravaging fish” and the Great Lakes “other than the gates of two busy navigation locks.”
Attorney General Cox had no intention of losing the initiative on the carp issue, and his office intends to file suit in federal court to try and close those locks, saying, “Asian carp must be stopped now.”
Well, let’s hope we still can. It would have been easier to stop them years ago. But biologists who raised the issue were ignored. What we need is not partisan posturing but for all our leaders to come together and form a non-political task force to stop the carp, and then also tackle other invasive species.
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