Lunch: Indiana Department of natural Resources employees conducted a demonstration of electro-shocking fish in the Wabash River in June of 2012. One employee holds a silver, or Asian carp. Staff file photo by Jim Avelis
TERRE HAUTE — Asian carp are the crows of the Wabash River.
Uninvited, they’ve elbowed past native species for food and living space. As with the crows blackening the wintertime skies above Terre Haute, the Asian carp will be gobbling up plankton and leaping from the water like aquatic missiles in the Wabash for years to come. The big, ugly fish are here to stay. At least until humans figure out how to oust them.
It sounds like a sci-fi B-movie plot, but it’s true.
“My honest opinion, at this point, is that we have them forever,” said Reuben Goforth, a Purdue University aquatic ecologist who monitors Asian carp with his students. “Unless some very unexpected technology comes around that allows us to eradicate them, they’re going to be around. We can achieve control of them in the Wabash, but I don’t know whether we can ever eradicate them.”
In fairness to the carp, they never wanted to be here, either. Southern farmers imported Asian carp from central China to eat up algae and weeds in their aquaculture ponds. The fish infiltrated the Mississippi River when those ponds spilled over during floods in the 1970s, and gradually migrated north into the Ohio River and its tributary, the Wabash.
Can’t they and the existing aquatic wildlife all just get along, you ask? Not easily. Asian carp eat mass quantities of plankton and “filter feed” by ingesting nutrients others count on, explained John Goss — the White House’s Asian carp czar — in a July 2012 interview in Terre Haute, filmed by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. “Therefore, they’re robbing the whole food chain of a lot of nutrients,” Goss said, standing on a Wabash sand bar two years ago.
Asian carp constitute a threat large enough to inspire a bipartisan coalition of 15 U.S. senators to call for White House assistance to prevent their spread into the Great Lakes. (Yes, Republican and Democrat senators worked together so it must be serious.) Last January, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued eight proposals to stop the fish from swimming through Chicago waterways into Lake Michigan, and from Eagle Marsh near Fort Wayne into Lake Erie, using various barriers. Disagreements over the impact of those multi-billion-dollar strategies linger, but the senators insisted “urgent action is needed.”
The survival of the Great Lakes’ ecological balance is obviously important. The lakes need to be protected from becoming the Asian carp’s next and biggest victims. Still, back home in Indiana, it’s hard not to wonder, “What about the Wabash?” After all, it was the setting for the flying-fish-frenzy video in 2010 that went viral on the Internet and exposed the extent of the problem, visually, to the world. Terre Haute river enthusiast Brendan Kearns shot the video while boating near Montezuma with a friend, capturing a surreal scene with hundreds of silver carp jumping over, and into, their boat. The clip, featuring Kearns laughing uncontrollably in amazement, has generated 1,738,100 views on YouTube.
Kearns hasn’t encountered a similar Asian carp outburst. Still, on an outing last week, three of the massive fish vaulted into his boat.
“For me, it’s definitely a problem,” Kearns said. “I do not see them declining.”
When the Army Corps of Engineers released its report in January, Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller — who witnessed the carp proliferation firsthand while boating the Wabash during his 2013 summer vacation — expressed disappointment that the engineers’ study offered no suggestions to control Asian carp in the Wabash. The Army Corps insisted their instructions by Congress were to focus on the Great Lakes and Mississippi River.
Likewise, the senators’ callout to the White House last week didn’t mention the Wabash. Still, in a statement issued Wednesday afternoon to the Tribune-Star, one of those senators — Indiana’s Joe Donnelly — said the Wabash carp predicament remains on his radar. “One of my priorities in the United States Senate is protecting our natural resources and waterways, including the Wabash River, from invasive species like Asian carp,” Donnelly said. “It’s critical that we stop the spread of Asian carp and work to eliminate them in areas where they already exist.”
Donnelly's office also explained that the senator believes the focus of federal efforts should be on stopping the spread of Asian carp and promoting critical research on ways to control existing populations so that we can develop a strategic plan to push the carp out of non-native areas, including the Wabash.
That research includes work by scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey to develop a pesticide that targets only the Asian carp, said Doug Keller, aquatic habitat coordinator for the Indiana DNR. In the meantime, federal funding regarding Asian carp control in Indiana centers on Eagle Marsh, where the early stages of the Wabash flow near the Maumee River, which connects to Lake Erie.
Ideally, if additional funding were available, those extra federal dollars could support the Geological Survey scientists’ pursuit of a “magic bullet” pesticide and allow the DNR to contract and oversee commercial fishing of Asian carp, Keller speculated. An experimental commercial fishing program in neighboring Illinois by its DNR aims to thin the Asian carp population in the Illinois River, another Asian carp hotbed. The harvested fish are processed into fertilizer.
The Wabash isn’t as Asian carp-friendly as the Illinois, Mississippi and Ohio rivers, Keller said. The Wabash runs 411 miles undammed from Huntington — the longest stretch of free-flowing river in the Eastern U.S. Dams turn the Illinois, Mississippi and Ohio into a virtual “series of lakes,” Keller said Wednesday. Asian carp prefer lakes, he added.
Thus, “I don’t think they’ll ever build up the numbers in the Wabash that you see in the Illinois and Mississippi rivers,” Keller said.
Commercial fishing of Asian carp on the Wabash would need monitoring by the DNR, he emphasized. Silver carp — the leaping variety of Asian carp — must be captured with nets. Anchored gill nets used elsewhere to catch them might also snare shovelnose sturgeon — a highly sought-after fish for its caviar, which has a uniquely large population in the Wabash. Use of the gill nets, not permitted in Indiana now, would need close control by the DNR to protect other aquatic wildlife, such as the shovelnose, Keller said.
Asian carp could be marketable if two negatives could be overcome — the name “carp” (a turnoff for American consumers) and the fish’s bony body, Goforth said.
A fish market operator in Illinois is tackling those hurdles. Clint Carter, whose family has run Carter’s Fish Market in Springfield for 31 years, has recipes for Asian carp filets and even canned carp, similar to tuna. It’s tasty, he said by telephone Tuesday. Asian carp eat plankton and aren’t bottom-feeders like common carp, Carter said, so their meat is white and flaky. “I’ve had a lot of people say it’s the best fish they ever ate,” he said.
On the downside, only 10 percent of the fish is useable because of its pervasive skeleton. So, it costs $8 a pound at his market.
The notoriety Carter has experienced surprised him. He gets inquiries about recipes and carp-cleaning techniques almost daily from media and others in Asian-carp-affected states. He’s ready to pass the torch as the Asian carp culinary go-to guy. “Maybe I’ll teach somebody that’ll take over my spot,” he said.
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