Asian carp are voracious eaters - silver carp can reach 100 pounds in weight while bighead carp (right) can weigh up to 30 pounds by age three. USGS photo
While governmental agencies have put up barriers and are considering other measures to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes to protect their fishing industries, Indiana Attorney Gen. Greg Zoeller is suggesting that federal officials need to be mindful also of what's happening in Indiana's rivers and streams.
Those bodies of water, especially the Lower Wabash River south of Lafayette, also have been invaded by Asian carp.
The carp are a threat to the Great Lakes' multibillion-dollar commercial fishing industry and could cause the loss of 800,000 jobs, officials trying to protect the lakes say.
There are two species of Asian carp in this part of the country; silver carp, which can reach 100 pounds and fly out of the water when they are startled such as by boat motors, and bighead carp, which can weigh up to 30 pounds by the time they are age 3.
Asian carp have no natural enemies, no predators waiting to do them in.
Asian carp were brought to the U.S. about 40 years ago to clean the algae and wastes in commercial catfish ponds in the South. Some owners of municipal sewage treatment plants also bought them in the 1970s with the approval of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to be ecofriendly cleaners of sewage treatment ponds, where there were algae and floating solids to eat.
Zoeller said the decades-later upshot has been disaster - as he said it has been with just about every other species brought in to the U.S. to control or eliminate a plant or animal problem.
When floods washed over the catfish ponds, Asian carp were freed from their boundaries and made the most of it. They swam up the Mississippi and other rivers, grabbed the food other fish needed, and kept on going.
They not only are an environmental problem but also a safety hazard, Zoeller said, citing YouTube videos of flying carp attacks on people in boats.
Biologists had warned for years that Asian carp would become an ecological problem before anyone officially paid attention, and many critics of the effort so far say the carp were already out of control by then.
Asian carp have voracious appetites. Their diet includes microscopic plankton, and bighead carp can eat at least half of their body weight a day.
The problem with their appetites is that very young fish at the bottom of the food chain also eat plankton, as do mussels and paddlefish. When their food is gobbled up by the Asian carp, other fish cannot survive or they cannot grow to be big enough for sport-fishing or commercial harvesting .
Asian carp reproduce in astonishing numbers, bringing on more and more invasive fish to dominate the food supplies and to crowd out native, desirable species. According to published reports, in parts of the Mississippi River that used to be rife with bass and crappie, carp now account for 80 percent of the fish in the water.
Although Indiana does not have as big of commercial and sport-fishing industries as the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River and other waterways, there is plenty of harm that Asian carp can do in the Hoosier state, Zoeller said Tuesday during a visit to Jefferson County. He and his family were boating down the Ohio River on a journey he said was a combination vacation and kickoff of his re-election campaign. He had breakfast with local Republicans, spoke to high school students in a summer program at Hanover College, met with people at the college's Rivers Institute and stopped at The Madison Courier.
Professional bass angler Wes Thomas of Hanover can attest to the arrival of Asian carp in Indiana waters. They aren't as numerous locally as they are downstream at McAlpine Lock and Dam in Louisville - where he said they are jammed against the dam - and in Ohio River tributaries near Tell City, but they are coming, he said.
"I think they're going to be a big issue before long even in our area," Thomas said.
He first saw Asian carp when he was fishing in Paducah, Ky., five years ago.
"They were just thick," he said.
"It's just a matter of time before they get up in our pool (section of the Ohio River) here, and people are going to be real surprised the way they react to the engine noise," Thomas said.
Last week when he was fishing in a tournament in Tell City, Thomas had just turned on his trolling motor while fishing in a creek when "I had about a 20-pounder almost jump in the boat."
The Internet has many videos of silver carp jumping and stories of people who got slapped so hard they got a broken nose or broken arm, or were knocked unconscious.
"They could actually cause injuries to someone in a boat," Thomas said. In Missouri and Illinois, he said, some skiers wear armor to protect themselves from jumping silver Asian carp.
When a carp lands in a boat, he said, it is not pleasant. "They're slimy and they bleed," he said. "It's slime you can't hardly wash off."
He said public awareness of the Asian carp problem will increase when the fish are more numerous here.
"When your boating public gets to see these, they'll be more aware," he said. "They'll hit the side of the boat, get up against the motor. They're just everywhere."
Thomas said he got an idea for a way to profit from silver Asian carp: Buy large metal trash can lids and sell them to boaters to use as shields.
Others already are having fun and profit from Asian carp. There are several commercial carp processing plants, including one in Illinois that as of early 2010 was processing 12 million pounds of carp a year in a 30,000-square-foot building. The carp sell well in ethnic markets in big U.S. cities and also are exported to China, Japan and other countries.
But most Americans have not embraced carp as a food because it has a reputation for eating nasty things, and it is bonier than Americans like to tackle on a dinner plate. Still, there are recipes online for fried, baked, smoked and pickled carp, for carp tacos and for ground carp patties.
Louisiana chef Philippe Parola, who has a consulting business, has described the taste as being a combination of scallops and crabmeat.
There have been marketing efforts to try to make carp acceptable, and Parola is among those pushing Asian carp.
Those efforts have included changing its name. Some restaurants call it silverfin on their menus. Researchers at Kentucky State University in Frankfort started looking into marketing it as Kentucky tuna.
Because bighead and silver Asian carp eat by filtering food out of the water, they don't snap up a squiggling worm on a hook or get fatally attracted to artificial bait. Catching them in commercial nets has not been entirely successful; a clip on YouTube shows a net tearing due to the weight of the fish.
Carpbusters.com, a fishing club whose motto is "Conservationists Protecting Native Fish," along with other groups such as World Hunting Group have tournaments where anglers bow-hunt to remove Asian carp from waterways.
Another, opposite, approach to carp fishing is promoted by Carp Anglers Group and its associated group, the American Carp Society. Their big annual tournament, which draws anglers from all over the world, is in Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas. There, another species of Asian carp, grass carp, is plentiful and can be caught. But these anglers don't catch the carp to destroy them; their tournaments are catch-and-release.
Zoeller said that it is not up to him how to solve the carp problem in Indiana, but to try to ensure that those in a position to do something take action.
Zoeller said he is getting involved in the Asian carp issue as attorney general, representing the state Department of Natural Resources and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, under authority of state law allowing the attorney general to act to protect the environment.
He wrote a letter this week to John Goss, whom President Barack Obama appointed the Asian carp director at the White House Council on Environmental Quality and who also is chairman of the Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee. Goss, who has been dubbed the carp czar, formerly was director of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.
Zoeller wrote that he has reviewed the coordinating committee's new carp strategy, and "it appears that the efforts are primarily concentrating on methods of detection, plus control and capture activities along the Chicago Shipping and Sanitation Canal," Zoeller wrote to Goss.
"While I am firmly convinced that we must prevent the carp from forming self-sustaining populations in the Great Lakes, I also have a serious concern with the current risks already present in Indiana's rivers and streams. The waterways of Indiana, especially the lower Wabash River, already harbor self-sustaining populations of Asian carp that currently pose risks to the native fish populations and the surrounding environment that we all seek to avoid in the Great Lakes," Zoeller wrote.
"Do we accept those populations with their attendant impact on the sport-fishing industry and attempt to control them, or do we contemplate an effort to address their removal? Obviously the cost of such efforts to combat a problem the citizens of our state did not cause would be greater than any state could afford," Zoeller wrote.
The outdoors editor at the Toledo Blade, Matt Markey, summarized frustration over the anti-carp effort in a commentary published last week:
"The broad, nonpartisan consortium of groups and individuals that have been clamoring for dramatic action to stop these Franken-fish have grown increasingly frustrated by a daisy chain of government committees and study groups, and what many see as the impossibly slow pace of the effort. Before they were coerced to rethink things, the feds quarterbacking the Asian carp effort were looking at a 2029 date to complete their work."
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