(IL) Chicago Tribune – When we learned that wildlife officials had spent $3 million poisoning the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to kill one Asian carp (and tens of thousands of innocent by-swimmers), our first response was whew!
The purpose of last weekend’s deliberate fish kill wasn’t to eradicate the carp population but to make sure none of them was close enough to make a run past an underwater electric barrier while it was shut down for maintenance. Despite the near-hysterical protests of some of our neighbors, the body count suggests the carp aren’t poised to take over Lake Michigan the day after tomorrow. Their numbers must be smaller than feared, we thought, or the barriers are working better than the doomsayers want to believe. More