What’s next? Olympic carp competition?

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If you’re bored of kayaking, swimming and other standard Great Lakes activities, the Peoria Carp Hunters offer to take you on a tour of the Illinois River. The catch: it’s a bow fishing trip, and the target is the Asian carp, a Great Lakes invasive species. Booking a trip with Capt. Nathan Wallick (Coast Guard certified) costs $120 per hour, with all equipment provided. Wallick moved to Peoria five years ago, and had grown up hunting and fishing. When he took his boat down to the river for the first time and saw a fish jump, he immediately got his bow.

Echo

Enjoy a Great Lakes horror movie marathon

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It’s enough Asian carp footage to host a movie marathon. Recently released high-definition and streaming videos of the invasive species are available for download at the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. Watch massive schools of silver carp flying toward video cameras or a barge moving past the electric invasive species barrier in Romeoville, Ill. They are just two of the multiple choices interested viewers can choose. With a run time of about 30 seconds, the Asian carp videos are sorted into four sections:

The fish in captivity
Barriers preventing the fish from entry into the Great Lakes
 Chicago waterways the fish could sneak through
Asian carp in the wild

It’s the first time such extensive filming of Asian carp has been made available, says the Ohio Outdoor News in a recent story about the footage.

Echo

Carp identity kit

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You may know about the Asian carp, but would you know one if you saw one?

This video distinguishes bighead, silver and grass carp (aka Asian carp) from their not-so-notorious brethren, common carp.

Echo

It’s 11:55 p.m.; Do you know where your Asian carp are?

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Longtime environment writer Jeff Alexander just launched a nifty feature to track the Asian carp crisis. It’s modeled after the Doomsday Clock that scientists created in the 1940s to track how the world inched toward nuclear holocaust. The Asian Carp Doomsday Clock features hands made of images of bighead and silver carp – two of the species biologists and others fear could devastate the Great Lakes ecosystem. Jeff does a nice round up of a week’s worth of bad news along the carp Maginot Line to justify setting the hands at a mere five minutes before midnight. When the original Doomsday Clock was launched in 1947, it was set at seven minutes to midnight.

Echo

Carp czar meets in Chicago; here’s Gary Wilson’s take

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The federal government’s carp czar is holding a public meeting in Chicago today to discuss efforts to prevent Asian carp from establishing in the Great Lakes. Here’s what Great Lakes Echo’s Gary Wilson had to say about the issue on WMUK in Kalamazoo, Mich. The White House Council on Environmental Quality Asian Carp Director John Goss is leading the meeting of the Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee.  Information at the bottom of this post explains how to participate at 2 p.m. Central time (3 p.m. Eastern) via webcast.

Asian carp gains ground in southern states; Great Lakes vanguard wages war

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Asian carp may be swimming fat and happy in lakes, ponds and bayous downstream of the Mississippi River thanks to recent spring floods. NPR reported Friday that scientists are worried the monster fish will crowd out food sources for native fish in these once carp-free areas. April and May storms flooded more than 6.5 million acres along the Mississippi river from Missouri to Louisiana, possibly allowing several non-native species commonly known as Asian carp to infiltrate surrounding water bodies, according to the story. Asian carp, brought to the U.S. by farmers to prevent algae growth in southern catfish ponds, invaded the Mississippi River decades ago and headed north. Fearing the carp would pass through the man-made Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to Lake Michigan and surrounding lakes, the Army Corps of Engineers constructed an electric barrier in the canal to prevent the ferocious fish from utterly disrupting the ecosystem and food chain of the lakes.