OTTAWA, Ill. — One of the great myths about Asian carp is that the war against them will be won if the Great Lakes region succeeds in keeping them out of Lake Michigan.
Indeed the stakes are high in that part of the Midwest, including in communities that wrap around the fertile fishing waters of Lake Erie’s western basin, and the rivers that feed into the lake.
U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo), speaking at the National Museum of the Great Lakes on Monday, said the invasive species “threaten to devastate northern Ohio’s fishing industry and permanently change how our boaters, anglers, and tourists enjoy our beloved Lake Erie.”
But the Great Lakes are the site of only one battle in the Asian carp war, and environmental experts contend there is no apparent end in sight to what has evolved over several decades into a slow-moving biological disaster cutting across the heart of North America.
That was the topic of a recent two-day immersion workshop that took journalists from the hustle-and-bustle of downtown Chicago, where many Asian-carp policy debates are being hashed out, to a quiet stretch of central Illinois, where government agencies in the last decade have caught and killed enough of the fish to fill several tractor-trailers.
The fearsome group of four Asian carp species — mostly silver and bighead carp, but also black carp and grass carp to some extent — have destroyed habitat for native fish everywhere they’ve been, including Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee.
About a million pounds of Asian carp are pulled out of the Illinois River and the nearby Des Plaines River each year now. An area of the Des Plaines known as the Dresden Pool — one of the hot zones for Asian carp — has had a 97 percent reduction in those fish since 2012.
Yet Asian carp just keep coming and coming.
“Oh, they’ll be back in about two weeks,” Duane Chapman, the United States Geological Survey invasive carp research team leader at the agency’s Columbia Environmental Research Center, told journalists Monday as his crew was moving nets into position inside a penned-off area of the Illinois River to begin their latest haul.
He said his crews once pulled 240,000 pounds of Asian carp out of that part of the Illinois, near Buffalo Rock State Park, in a matter of hours.
“The fish aren’t evil,” Mr. Chapman said. “It’s a weed problem. A weed is a plant out of place. These are fish out of place.”
The state of Illinois alone spends more than $5 million a year now on tracking, studying, and capturing Asian carp. About $2 million of that is spent on hiring commercial fishermen to remove as many of the nuisance fish as they can. The money comes from the $300 million Great Lakes Restoration Initiative that Congress created in 2009 at the request of then-President Barack Obama.
“We’re never going to remove all of the fish. It’s like mowing the lawn,” Brian Colgan, Colgan Carp Solutions president and founder, said. “They keep coming back.”
Mr. Colgan’s company is in the business of trying to develop new markets for the Asian carp meat. It is used now for anything from fertilizer to pet food.
“I feel like we have to view this fish as a commodity,” Mr. Colgan said. “Yes, it’s a nuisance fish. But it’s a commodity.”
Dirk Fucik, owner of a Chicago-based seafood shop and restaurant, was one of the first to sell Asian carp burgers to humans when his business began slinging the patties in 2010. It gave away 800 carp burgers that year at what is billed as the world’s largest food festival, the five-day Taste of Chicago held in downtown Chicago’s Grant Park each July.
Mr. Fucik said Asian carp’s neutral flavor tastes better to him than tilapia. He mixes in salsa and other flavors, including pumpkin spice this time of year.
Asian carp, according to Mr. Chapman, are one of the most popular forms of protein in the world. But he and Mr. Fucik said the fish is unlikely to penetrate North American food markets in a meaningful way for one reason: It’s hard to get the meat off them.
“It’s a super bony fish,” Mr. Fucik said. “The best we could do is grind them up. Anything you can do with ground beef you can do with carp. You’ve really got to pick through the bones.”
In this country, he said, consumers “want boneless, skinless fish that don’t look like fish.”
“It’s not like a salmon fillet,” Mr. Fucik said. “We’ve tried many ways to make it a beautiful, eight-ounce piece, but it ain’t gonna happen.”
So how did North America get into this situation, with highly destructive fish from Asia moving north along the Mississippi River and knocking on the Great Lakes region’s southwest door near Chicago? How has that stoked fear in the western Lake Erie region some 250 miles to the east, where dozens of jobs depend on the Great Lakes region’s $7 billion fishery?
Andrew Reeves, a Toronto-based journalist and author of a 2019 book called Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, said the government itself is partly to blame for the Asian carp crisis — not just for the length of time it has taken to respond to it, but because it actively encouraged their proliferation in the past.
That push came after Rachel Carson’s landmark 1962 book Silent Spring — considered by many scholars as the birth of the modern environmental movement — raised questions about society’s heavy reliance on cancer-causing pesticides.
The immediate reaction to the book gave people a much different perspective on Asian carp than they have today, with government agencies praising the fish for their ability to ingest large amount of algae and pond scum without using so many chemicals, Mr. Reeves said. They were even used to eat human feces from sewage lagoons.
One fish farmer in Arkansas imported bighead Asian carp into the United States that year. The following year, silver Asian carp and black carp were brought in.
Auburn University began breeding the fish. It gave away many of them. Landowners in Arkansas were particularly fond of them, with as many as 90 percent of the carp believed to be in one 15-square-mile region of that state.
Many of the fish got loose when flooding caused water levels to rise to levels in which they could escape.
As Mr. Chapman and his crew plied the Illinois River with journalists on Monday, he showed them how the fish are regularly corralled into aquatic pens so they can be scooped up with nets. The crew uses underwater sound to separate Asian carp from other fish, knowing the carp are especially sensitive to noise.
The operations begin each fall, when water temperatures drop to 45 degrees or less. Asian carp — especially the silver carp, known for their leaping ability out of the water — are almost impossible to catch during the summer because their bodies are more active. When the water gets cold, they become far less active to conserve energy.
That means the hauls often are made in less-than-ideal conditions, when humans trying to catch them are cold, too, and light ice can even form on the water.
“I tell my crew, ‘if you’re not miserable, you’re not doing it right,’” Mr. Chapman said “This is not easy work.”
He said the two most troublesome Asian carp — the silvers and bigheads — are getting smaller because there are so many of them they’re competing among each other for food. And the silvers are becoming more dominant than bigheads, he said.
Many of the Asian carp in Illinois now are even too skinny to be marketed as food.
The multilayered line of defense aimed at keeping Asian carp from reaching Lake Michigan includes a series of three electric barriers 37 miles from Chicago in Romeoville, Ill., where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also is planning to build a fourth.
The federal government spends nearly $14 million a year to operate that site, with about $1.5 million of that used to pay for the electricity of those three barriers.
Chuck Shea, the Corps project manager at the site, calls it the largest series of electrical barriers in the world.
It was originally built to keep out a different invasive species, the round goby. It began operation in 2002 and was used intermittently for years, but is now on at all times, he said.
But it is known to be effective only on fish six inches or longer, Mr. Shea said.
A fourth electrical barrier was authorized by Congress in 2007. Once built, it will put out 4.3 megawatts — nearly three times the 1.5 megawatts produced by two of the current units.
“That gives us the possibility of getting the small fish, as well,” Mr. Shea said.
Much of the region’s hopes also lie in the Brandon Road Lock and Dam which the Corps operates near Joliet, Ill., 47 miles from Lake Michigan.
It is supposed to be redesigned in a way that will prevent any fish from getting past it. The $41 million project is still awaiting Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker’s signature so the federal agency can move into its final design phase.
That project is seen as a compromise to a complete separation of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds.
There will be an electrical barrier, an air bubble, and acoustic noise used as deterrents at the Brandon Road site. Dave Hamilton, Great Lakes policy director for the Nature Conservancy, also said he is encouraging the Corps to add chlorine there — but only at levels roughly equivalent to what humans use to disinfect swimming pools.
“People hate chlorine,” he said. “But what are the other options?”
On Tuesday, Michigan Department of Natural Resources Director Dan Eichinger said that state believes in the Brandon Road project so much that it is willing to contribute $8 million toward the preconstruction, engineering, and design.
“We will do everything we can to help Illinois,” Tammy Newcomb, Michigan DNR senior water policy adviser, said. “I just don’t think we can be fast enough.”
She said Ohio has been “a strong partner” in these and other Asian carp negotiations.
“We are approaching this with a no-regrets policy,” Ms. Newcomb said of the Brandon Road project. “I’m pretty sure if we keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes we won’t regret that.”
Although many experts now say they are unsure what to make of the presence of Asian carp environmental DNA, or eDNA, it has once again appeared well beyond the Romeoville electric barriers and the Brandon Road Lock and Dam.
The latest round of test results, released on Nov. 1, had positive hits for Asian carp eDNA in 76 of 414 water samples from waters connected to Lake Michigan. Some 49 samples from an area in the south branch of the Chicago River known as Bubbly Creek had silver carp eDNA and 27 had bighead eDNA. No actual fish were found.
More sampling and assessment is planned in the Chicago area through Nov. 15.
First Published November 10, 2019, 2:27 a.m.
