Marketplace of Ideas Blog

When Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008, he probably didn’t figure he would have to deal with … carp.

Obama may not be personally participating, but his White House Office on Environmental Quality will indeed be dealing with carp — specifically the Asian carp threatening to invade Lake Michigan.

The tone of the Wisconsin-based reporting on the carp threat sometimes sounds like the plot to a bad science fiction movie, except that the physical threat — that is, getting hit in your boat by flying carp — appears to be accurate (more on that later).

The threat to the environment (these carp appear to eat everything in sight, which imperils more native fish) and the tourism and fishing industries is what has generated calls to close off, either temporarily or permanently, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which connects the Mississippi River (from whence the carp apparently are coming) and the Great Lakes.

Henry Henderson, of the National Resources Defense Council, spells out the threat:

We are not talking about common carp, which are eaten in many places. The critters in question here are the silver and bighead carp. I must admit I’ve never dined on them, but I've always heard that they taste horrible. Worse, they have interlaced, "floating bones" that make them a nightmare to eat.

While the fish are not good to eat, they are very good at eating. They can get up to 100 pounds in size and eat 40% of their body weight daily. They are too big for most native species to prey on, so as a result the Asian carp simply out-eat and out-breed the rest (and the results are abundantly clear in sections of the Illinois River where the carp now represent 90% of the total biomass!). In the Great Lakes system, already taxed by influxes of other non-native species, it could be the last straw.

That, however, convinced neither the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected an injunction Jan. 19 to require that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers temporarily close the canal, nor the Obama Administration, which orchestrated a (pardon the pun) dog-and-pony show in Chicago to show its commitment to stop the carp while opposing closing the canal locks to do so. (I’m sure the fact that Obama was an Illinois senator had nothing to do with his administration’s taking the side of Illinois over Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin. To give equal cynicism time, however, I must add that Michigan’s attorney general, who filed the initial lawsuit, is a Republican running for governor.)

Our neighbors to the south are really not taking the carp threat seriously, although they are taking the economic threat of closing their canal seriously. First, read these halcyon memories of when the carp showed up in the Illinois River:

“Back in the 1920s and ’30s, when all the industrial waste and sewage came [from Chicago] down the Illinois River, it was devoid of oxygen almost all the way to Peoria,” said Mark Pegg, aquatic ecologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey’s Illinois River Biological Station in Havana.

“Almost all the river was basically devoid of life, other than maybe a few microbes.”

“I remember seeing the soap suds," said Bill Douglass, site superintendent of the Rice Lake Conservation Area, near Liverpool.

Reforms that began in earnest with the 1972 Clean Water Act have taken hold. …

The bad news is an invasion of two types of non-native fish from Asia, silver and big head carp. The big head carp, which routinely exceeds 30 pounds, is bad because it competes with native species for limited food resources.

But the almost-as-large silver carp, which evidently is aroused by boat propellers, leaps like a dolphin, sometimes into the boats and sometimes smack into the people in them.

“Everybody that runs the river at all has been nailed by ’em, and it’s dangerous,” said Douglass. “If you’re running 25 miles an hour and get hit by a 20-pound fish, it’s gonna hurt.”

Other Tribune letter-writers suggest making carp soup, clay pot-braised carp head, sweet and sour carp steaks, or Hunan-style carp steaks in kung pao sauce.

The most commonly heard proposal is to close the Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal, which connects Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River after the ridge that divided the Chicago River from the Des Plaines River was removed and a canal was built in the late 1880s. (There now are three canals, with carp DNA detected in two of them.)

Closing the canal would predictably damage both tourism-related businesses and shipping, since there would no longer be a direct connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. The first issue would seem to be a battle between Illinois businesses and businesses in other Great Lakes states, seeing as how getting a reputation for carp that can jump out of the water and hit unsuspecting boaters isn’t particularly tourism-friendly.

The second is summed up by Chicago Tribune columnist Dennis Byrne:

What is the impact, even of a short shutdown? The Great Lakes fishing industry isn’t the only one with an interest. More than 14.6 million tons of commodities annually move through the canal, according to the American Waterways Operators. Iron and steel from northern Indiana, gravel and building materials for Chicago are among the commodities whose Great Lakes shipment would be halted or would have to be shipped by alternative, more costly methods.

Whether other ways, namely rail and trucks, are “more costly,” the fact is that alternatives do exist to get goods from the west end of Wisconsin and Illinois to the east end and vice versa.

Some environmentalists, such as Henderson, claim a permanent shutdown of the Chicago canal is necessary to prevent invasive species from getting into the Great Lakes via the Mississippi. That would be closing the barn door after the horses have escaped in the case of the sea lamprey (which actually came from the east), zebra and quagga mussels, and possibly now the carp.

Two questions, though, make me stop short of advocating the most extreme solution. First: Will anything actually stop the carp? In an excellent example of the law of unintended consequences, the carp apparently traveled up the Mississippi River from Arkansas, where they were brought in by a farmer who then gave them to Arkansas state fishery officials who used them in sewage treatment experiments. (I told you this sounds like a bad sci-fi movie.)

One concern about carp getting into Lake Michigan stems from the fact that the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and the Des Plaines River are separated by less than 100 yards in some places … until their water mixes during floods. No one can definitively say that such other proposed solutions as chemical and electrical barriers will work.

Second: Can the carp survive this far north? No one knows that for sure either, but environmentalists point out that the carp originally came from a region of approximately this latitude. Of course, that was well before they were imported to Arkansas.

Regular readers know that I am somewhat skeptical of what has become the environmental movement. The difference here, however, is that these carp have the potential to cause serious economic damage to Lake Michigan-based businesses, in part because of the environmental damage they apparently can cause by being the Pac Men of whatever body of water they’re in.

The carp summit needs to have more come out of it than what usually comes out of summits, blue ribbon panels and other opportunities to pose for political holy pictures.

Photo courtesy PrairieStateOutdoors.com.