Mass poisoning to keep carp invaders from Great Lakes
By Phil McKenna, 10 December 2009 Sometimes the “few” are made to suffer to protect the many. Tens of thousands of fish were poisoned last week in a drastic attempt to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes. Officials poured more than 8000 litres of the fish poison rotenone into a 9-kilometre stretch of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which links the Mississippi river and Lake Michigan, during maintenance work on a barrier that normally keeps invaders at bay using electric shocks. It is feared that if the voracious bighead and silver carp are not kept out, they will out-compete the native species crucial to the lakes’ sports and commercial fishery, worth $7 billion per year. “There are some stretches on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers where they have taken over the biology entirely,” says Stacey Solano of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. “We can’t afford not to do everything possible to keep the Asian carp out of the Great Lakes.” …
