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228 pages

English

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Intelligent investigative writing meets experiential journalism in this important look at one of North America s most voraciously invasive species Politicians, ecologists, and government wildlife officials are fighting a desperate rearguard action to halt the onward reach of Asian Carp, four troublesome fish now within a handful of miles from entering Lake Michigan. From aquaculture farms in Arkansas to the bayous of Louisiana; from marshlands in Indiana to labs in Minnesota; and from the Illinois River to the streets of Chicago where the last line of defense has been laid to keep Asian carp from reaching the Great Lakes, Overrun takes us on a firsthand journey into the heart of a crisis. Along the way, environmental journalist Andrew Reeves discovers that saving the Great Lakes is only half the challenge. The other is a radical scientific and political shift to rethink how we can bring back our degraded and ignored rivers and waterways and reconsider how

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	12 mars 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773053356
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

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Overrun
Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis
Andrew Reeves
Copyright
Copyright © Andrew Reeves, 2019
Published by ECW Press
665 Gerrard Street EastToronto, Ontario, Canada M4M 1Y2
416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise - without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author s rights is appreciated.
Editor for the Press: Susan Renouf
Cover design: Michel Vrana
Cover illustrations (also used in the interior): © Joseph R. Tomelleri
Author photo: © Courtney Walker
Map illustrations: © Jackie Saik
Library and Archives Canada cataloguing in publication
Reeves, Andrew, 1984-, author
Overrun : dispatches from the Asian carp crisis / Andrew Reeves.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77041-476-1 (softcover)
ISBN 978-1-77305-336-3 (PDF)
ISBN 978-1-77305-335-6 (ePub)
1. Carp-United States. 2. Introduced fishes-United States. I. Title.
QL638.C94R44 2019 597 .4820973 C2018-905337-2 C2018-905338-0
For Courtney, who has always been there. And Frances, who came along the way.
Contents Introduction Chapter 1 In the Beginning Chapter 2 “Ecology’s Helper” Chapter 3 Tragedy of the White Amur Chapter 4 Research Backwater Chapter 5 Scientific Salvation Chapter 6 Trouble with Fishing Chapter 7 “Eat ’em to Beat ’em?” Chapter 8 The Glorious Gate Chapter 9 eDNA Rising Chapter 10 Via Chicago Chapter 11 At Home in the Great Lakes Conclusion Postscript Author’s Note Bibliography Acknowledgments Index About the Author
Introduction
We first crossed paths in 2012. Through the haze of research, travel, interviewing and reporting that has marked my time since, I can’t recall how I first heard about Asian carp. It feels as though they’ve always been in the ether. In early 2012, I was reporting for the Toronto Star, one of Canada’s largest newspapers, covering energy and the environment at Ontario’s legislature. I read somewhere of a grand, $18 billion plan from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to hydrologically separate the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River watershed by severing the aquatic links in Chicago. No simple redrawing of continental maps, the Corps’ scheme aimed to reset nature to how it once was.
I was baffled. Why was America’s largest civil engineering firm being charged by Congress to investigate ways of tinkering with a Midwest waterway? The short answer (because of a fish) left me with even more questions. And what, I subsequently wondered, had transpired over five decades so that this nuisance fish, introduced to the United States in the 1960s to eat aquatic weeds and clean aquaculture ponds, was now threatening the Great Lakes with ruin after disrupting freshwater ecosystems as far south as the Gulf of Mexico? Big projects fascinate me — like a child’s curiosity with fire trucks or dinosaurs — and this project felt big .
My first feature for a print publication appeared in This Magazine in the summer of 2012, for which I had frantically studied the Asian carp catastrophe, interviewing biologists, government officials and the heads of binational agencies. After the story was published, I watched the situation continue to deteriorate. The Great Lakes and Mississippi River Interbasin Study (GLMRIS), for which that $18 billion plan was conceived, had been delayed; bills before Congress and the Senate to tighten rules regulating the import of invasive species had stalled; and in 2013, Chicago sanitation officials dumped stormwater the city’s sewers couldn’t handle directly into Lake Michigan to mitigate flood risks, water that may have contained Asian carp. After these missteps, miscues and years of inaction, the Corps finally released their study in January 2014 to much fanfare.
Yet the shortcomings of news coverage accompanying the Corps’ report soon became obvious. Beyond notable exceptions from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ’s Dan Egan (whose wonderful book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes includes a chapter on the carp menace) and John Flesher from the Associated Press, most media accounts of Asian carp’s American odyssey were content to chalk their origin up to carelessness on the part of Southern aquaculturists, or, if charitable, to Mother Nature in the form of flooding in the early 1990s that let loose this scourge. But from what I had gleaned in researching my article for This , so much of Asian carp’s American history appeared uncomfortably reductive. The Army Corps, after all, doesn’t propose spending $18 billion in taxpayer money for nothing. What was being omitted from these oversimplified narratives?
I aimed to find out.
Their takeover was dramatic. In the first years of the twenty-first century, researchers estimated that bighead carp, one of four Asian carp species now in American waters, comprised 97 percent of the Mississippi River’s biomass. Havana, a hardscrabble town of 3,000 people in central Illinois, gained minor fame as ground zero for silver carp when their stretch of the Illinois River was found to contain more of the invasive fish per square mile than anywhere else on the planet. In rivers they occupy, Asian carp are often the only fish longer than 16 inches, suggesting many competing native fish fail to reach adulthood.
Within a decade of their introduction in 1963, grass carp spread to 32 states with the enthusiastic support of government agencies, private interests and academia. Silvers and bigheads, introduced in 1972 and sometimes lumped together under the moniker “bigheaded carp,” have moved effortlessly through the Mississippi watershed, following the Big Muddy and its tributary rivers like an interstate highway through the South and Midwest. By 1978, grass carp had spread 2,800 miles from their port of call in Arkansas, becoming what some believe to be the fastest spreading exotic species in North American history. “Their population exploded,” says Matt O’Hara from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR). “We saw our first fish in the early 1990s. Within a few years, there were fish everywhere.” Steve Butler, a biologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey, tells me he’s witnessed “billions of little, tiny silver carp everywhere” on the Illinois. “As far as the eye can see, it was solid spawning carp.” Researchers believe one spawning season can increase the silver carp population by a billion fish. Or more.
Bigheads strike a prehistoric pose, as though forgotten by evolution. Large, wide-set eyes sit low on bulbous heads, their mouths hanging in a perpetual frown. In rare cases, bigheads reach 140 pounds and 7 feet in length, though 40 pounds and a length of 28 inches is standard — still big by American freshwater fish standards. Silver carp also sport frowning mouths and scaly heads, heads that are, comparatively speaking, less bulging than the aptly-named bighead. They shade from silver and caramel-colored to olive green and can grow to 100 pounds, though 30 pounds is routine. Both silvers and bigheads share many physiological traits with the common carp found in waterways across the continent. Common carp aren’t native to North America, yet they predate anyone currently living and are thought of by many as naturalized. This European cousin of Asian carp was first introduced to North America from Europe in the mid-nineteenth century and spread by human hands with unthinkably reckless abandon (imagine tossing live fish from trains into rivers and streams that early transcontinental railways passed by).
There is a fourth member of the Asian carp family — the black carp. They are equal to grass, silver and bighead carp in their voracious eating habits, though they eat snails and molluscs, including numerous endangered North American mussels. An average black carp weighs in at 35 pounds, though they too are capable of reaching tremendous sizes. As best we know, they arrived in America accidentally in a shipment of grass carp in the early 1970s before fish farmers began importing them specifically in the 1980s for grub control. But unlike other members of the Asian carp family, black carp have been found in the wild in small but growing numbers only since the mid-1990s and have been subjected to significantly fewer studies on everything from reproduction and feeding habits to geographic spread. Subsequently, researchers can largely speculate on what destructive power they may wield, but preliminary research shows reason to worry. Currently, there is little I can add to their still-unfolding story.
The more I scrutinized bigheaded carps the more remarkable I found the functioning of their bodies to be. Both species are filter feeders that consume throughout the water column, from the surface of the water to the riverbed. They eat while breathing, a common trait for filter feeders, though in the plankton-rich waters of the Mississippi, it’s proven an especially successful physiological trait. Gill rakers, a crescent of spongelike cartilage just inside their mouths, usher even the smallest phytoplankton and other organic matter into their gaping maws.
Duane Chapman — one of the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) leading Asian carp experts — suggests that what sets Asian carp apart from other specialized feeders is their adaptability. “This is an unusual thing,” he says. Specially trained eaters tend to be the best at performing one task especially well. Think of the sword-billed hummingbird. With its thin beak, longer than its entire body, this South American bird can access nectar st