The Asian Carp Problem

[Dude]

Well, this is one way of dealing with Asian Carp wriggling into Lake Michigan...

 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122699283&ps=cprs

 

Asian Carp Will Soon Invade Store Shelves

by The Associated Press

 

January 18, 2010

Building off a state-developed marketing plan, a group of Louisiana-based companies has started a joint venture that will put Asian carp on retail shelves within weeks.

 

The fish are being marketed as silverfin, the name it was given in a marketing plan developed by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. The agency is promoting recreational and commercial applications of an invasive fish that has caused huge problems for boaters in northern states.

 

Rather than poisoning the fish to get rid of them like northern states have done, wildlife officials are opting to make them an appetizing meal.

 

Chef Philippe Parola of Baton Rouge, CEO of Chef Parola Enterprises and Partran, kick-started the campaign in the fall, and it's finally coming together in the New Year.

 

"We have the whole game plan ready to go," Parola said.

 

Months ago, food scientists, state biologists and federal agencies partnered to develop ways to clean and process the fish.

 

The state recently approved preliminary rules for the harvesting of silverfin.

 

Parola, along with Chef Cullen Lord of Fleming's Restaurant and Darryl Rivere of A la Carte Food, stepped in with recipes like silverfin cakes and silverfin almondine.

 

Rivere Foods of Paincortville has also signed on as the lead processor, New Orleans Fish House will be distributing the frozen products, and Rouses Supermarket is the first official buyer.

 

Parola will be attending the National Grocers Association Convention in Las Vegas to pitch the fish to its 1,500 members.

 

As for the fish's taste, Parola said that it's a cross between scallops and crab meat. "Consumers will love it," he said.

 

For state officials, creating a silverfin market is a biological win as well.

 

It's a relatively new species that competes with other fish for food and poses a risk to boaters since silverfin, which weigh as much as 30 pounds each, can jump out of the water. The fish have been known to cause boating accidents, black eyes, bruises or in the most extreme cases, death to the boater.

 

Additionally, eradication of this invasive species is basically impossible.

 

Parola said his role is unique because it puts private money behind a public problem. "This is being done without any taxpayer dollars," Parola said. "This is our money."

 

Culinary adventures are nothing new to Parola. In the early 1980s, he was among the chefs leading the way in cooking alligator meat. He was partly behind the effort for softshell crawfish as well, but he said it was "too expensive."

 

Parola, however, may be best known as the man who attempted to sell the nation on nutria meat a few years back.

 

The campaign for silverfin is "dramatically different," he said, because the fish doesn't resemble an overgrown rat.

 

"If we can't do something with silverfin, we are clowns. It's too good to ship to Asia, it's too good to use as bait, and it's too good to leave on the bank," he said.

 

The fish were introduced to the U.S. from east Asia in the 1970s to help manage aquaculture ponds and wastewater lagoons. They quickly escaped into the wild and arrived in Louisiana waters from the north in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

[IATTBYB]

Call it whatever you want, these fish are a freaking ecological disaster just waiting to happen. They can grow up to 100 pounds, eat up to 40% of their body weight per day on a diet consisting of plankton. They will destroy the Great Lakes fishery and the only way to keep them out of Lake Michigan (and Huron, Superior, Erie and Ontario and their tributaries) is closing the locks on the Chicago Sanitation and Shipping Canal. And guess what, the Supreme Court denied Michigan's (and other states) request for a TRO. So by the time the Court actually gets around to hearing the case and making a decision, these monsters will be in Lake Michigan. This makes me very ! I'd like to find the idiot who thought bringing these carp to the US was a good idea and ! Give me fresh whitefish, walleye, or steelhead any day over silverfin.

 

Article regarding the TRO

[Dude]

It's not looking good...

 

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-19/asian-carp-dna-found-in-great-lakes-army-corps-says-update1-.html

 

Asian Carp DNA Found in Great Lakes, Army Corps Says

 

By Mario Parker

 

Jan. 19 (Bloomberg) -- DNA from Asian carp was found in Lake Michigan for the first time, the Army Corps of Engineers said, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to order the closing of locks and dams on rivers in the Chicago area.

 

“We have one sample positive in the Calumet Harbor above the breakwater, so that is in Lake Michigan,” Major General John Peabody, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers Great Lakes and Ohio River division, said on a conference call with reporters.

 

The high court rejected arguments from Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, Minnesota and Ontario that immediate action is needed to keep the fish from entering Lake Michigan. Donna Cansfield, Ontario’s natural resources minister, said that if carp spill from the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and spread through the Great Lakes, it could hurt commercial fishing.

 

“The world’s largest freshwater fishery is Lake Erie -- and that perch goes primarily to the U.S.,” Cansfield said in an interview.

 

Federal officials said they have yet to find actual carp in Lake Michigan, and it’s not clear how big a threat they pose.

 

“Even if a few live carp get into Lake Michigan, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are there in self-sustaining populations,” said Cameron Davis, senior adviser on Great Lakes issues to Lisa Jackson, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator.

 

Robbing Native Fish

 

Previous tests indicated that carp had made their way from the Mississippi River to within 6 miles (10 kilometers) of the lake. The carp grow as big as 4 feet (1.2 meters) and 100 pounds (45 kilograms), and consume “vast amounts of food,” according to the EPA. That would rob native species of the plankton they feed on, it said.

 

“Today’s announcement that DNA evidence of Asian carp has been found past the so-called electrical barrier and even the locks is frightening,” Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox said in a statement. “Michigan residents are outraged that President Obama’s administration and Illinois officials refuse to take immediate action despite continued evidence of an immediate threat.”

 

Cox, a Republican, is running for governor of the state.

 

Sport fishing’s impact on the Great Lakes states -- Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- totaled $7.09 billion in 2006, according to a report by the Alexandria, Virginia-based American Sportfishing Association.

 

 

Bond-Rating Threat

 

A carp invasion could lower the credit ratings of towns such as Grand Haven, Michigan, a city of about 10,500 people on Lake Michigan’s eastern shore, that’s rated AA by S&P, partly because of the “high value captured by vacation properties and second rental homes,” Scott Garrigan, a credit analyst at Standard & Poor’s in Chicago, wrote in a Sept. 30 update for the rating on its limited-tax general obligation bonds.

 

Shutting the Chicago-area locks has its own potential consequences, Peabody said, including water-quality problems and increased risk of flooding.

 

Shipping advocates praised the Supreme Court’s refusal to close the locks. They argue that shutting them would disrupt the transport of commodities, such as heating oil, road salt and fuel.

 

About 173 million tons of material was shipped via the Great Lakes in 2006, according to the most recent data available. That saved $3.6 billion in shipping costs compared with rail or trucks, the Corps said in a report released last January.

 

No Corps Authority

 

Federal officials on the call declined to answer questions about the court ruling. The corps doesn’t have authority to shut the Chicago-area locks, Peabody said, and doing so wouldn’t fully address the threat anyhow.

 

“Closing the locks alone in a controlled fashion is totally inadequate to the task,” he said. “The locks themselves are leaky,” and other waterways could allow carp into Lake Michigan.

 

By early March, the corps hopes to determine how locks and barge traffic can be operated in a way that would impede the carp without requiring closing the channel, Peabody said.

 

The corps and other agencies will try to determine whether carp are traveling in ballast water from barge traffic.

 

“We are doing everything possible to stop the advance” of the carp, Peabody said. “There is no silver bullet to this challenge.”

[bjorn_skurj]

Maybe they can make the fishies into Soylent Green.

[Tweedling]

How does that joke go, about how to cook carp? Something like, bake the carp on a cedar plank and after the carp is cooked throw it in the trash and eat the cedar plank.

Rimshot please.

[sureshot]

Closing the locks will do nothing this late in the game. Besides, all it takes is one numbskull to dump a bucket of them in the lake (which, for all we know has already happened).

[Ghost of Electricity]

How does that joke go, about how to cook carp? Something like, bake the carp on a cedar plank and after the carp is cooked throw it in the trash and eat the cedar plank.

Rimshot please.

I'll take the cedar any day.

[Smokestack Joe]

carp suck. i discovered that feeling when i was a kid. i fed them pretzel nuggets hand-to-mouth off a pier. he basically opened his mouth and i plopped the nugget in.

 

 

 

what a dumb fish.

[NightOfJoy]

Closing the locks will do nothing this late in the game. Besides, all it takes is one numbskull to dump a bucket of them in the lake (which, for all we know has already happened).

 

Its almost certainly happened already. Dead asian carp have been found in the Lincoln Park Zoo pond (thanks to my buddy), in Marquette Park pond and I believe in Columbus Park pond as well. What we have here are people who like carp and think they are doing themselves and the carp a favor by transporting them to new waters. In my book, I call that ecological terrorism. Anyone found doing so should be sentenced to a nice lengthy federal prison stay.

 

I do believe there is a chance that the carp will not multiply in LM in big numbers. Thanks to the zebra mussel, another invasive species, the waters of Lake Michigan hold much less biomass than before. I recall in the mid 1990s being amazed that I could actually see more than 5-10 inches into the water. Now you can see down 10-15 feet. Since the asian carp are primarily plankton eaters, I believe there simply isnt enough food to sustain a large population. I'm no biologist so who knows. At the very least, it will be interesting to watch what happens.

[sureshot]

I do believe there is a chance that the carp will not multiply in LM in big numbers. Thanks to the zebra mussel, another invasive species, the waters of Lake Michigan hold much less biomass than before. I recall in the mid 1990s being amazed that I could actually see more than 5-10 inches into the water. Now you can see down 10-15 feet. Since the asian carp are primarily plankton eaters, I believe there simply isnt enough food to sustain a large population. I'm no biologist so who knows. At the very least, it will be interesting to watch what happens.

 

Yea, the mussels have really done a number. A lot of people remark on the clarity of the lake as if its a good thing. The truth of the matter is its a clear indication that the lake has really been devastated.

[Dude]

It's pretty ridiculous how densely populated they become after a while. This is what the Mississippi looks like near Grafton, IL outside of St. Louis:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcQ56OpxNE

[Wendy]

Do they bite swimmers?

 

 

 

 

 

PS - I cannot stop reading this headline as "The Asian Crap Problem"

[NightOfJoy]

Do they bite swimmers?

 

 

 

 

 

PS - I cannot stop reading this headline as "The Asian Crap Problem"

 

No, they have no teeth.

[The High Heat]

PS - I cannot stop reading this headline as "The Asian Crap Problem"

I had just thought before I opened this thread that I was surprised no one here had started a spin off thread under that very headline.

[Smokestack Joe]

they jump out of water because the vibrations of the motor scare them or irritate them, they literally leap into the boat so where a hockey or football helmet cuz they could kill ya.

 

again, carp suck, dumb fish.