Defensive Ecologies: Extracting Asian Carp from the Illinois River
A welcome service laborer turned invasive pest in the Mississippi River, Asian Carp are subject to a variety of efforts to exert control upon their spread and attempts to extract them from the Illinois River, as Andrew Yang for Temporary continent. witnessed firsthand.
There is no eco-anxiety in the Midwest greater than the Asian Carp entering the Great Lakes. Since their early days in the 1970s working in catfish ponds in Arkansas as service laborers (eating the excess algae) to their jump into the Mississippi River during periodic flooding, Silver and Bighead Carp—the most abundant of the Asian Carp—have moved into almost every possible tributary in the river’s watershed. So far, underwater electric fences and sound deterrents keep the carp from crossing into Lake Michigan from the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal, but it would only take a few fish to get a finhold in the lake, which would not only put the sport and commercial fishing industries of the lakes at risk, it would also allow them to reach into new watersheds up north.
Asian carp being pulled up by commercial fisherman after being entangled in nets set in the Illinois River near one of the north-most points of the fishes' range. Bob
At the northern expanse of the Illinois River, which connects the Mississippi to the ship canal onward to Lake Michigan, The Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) hires regional river fishers to gill net as many carp as possible in hopes of reducing their numbers in the ship canal, and thus the probability of their heading into the Great Lakes; a kind of eco-border control.
Sliver carp jumping as fisherman drive into nets. Bob
On this early August day in Ottawa, IL, we accompanied the IDNR and the fishers they hire. They go around setting a gill net in an area of the river and then “beat” the water by revving boat engines and rhythmically slamming the bottom of their aluminum boats to create an underwater cacophony that will drive the fish into the nets. The Silver Carp are especially sensitive to noise, and often jump out of the water out of alarm or to escape it—indeed, it is the trait for which they are best known and reviled for, given the dangers such larger, jumping fish pose to boaters, water skiers, and the like. The fishers we followed caught hundreds and hundreds of pounds that day (of the millions of pounds in the Illinois River). It is all part of the attempt to control an exceptionally fecund, smart, and hungry kind of fish that—for better or for worse—has become part of the greater Mississippi.
By Andrew Yang
