The Fight Against America’s Most Hated Fish: Asian Carp

North America is at war with a very slippery foe. Controlling the carp is a matter of knowing thy enemy. The invader is ingenious and seemingly unstoppable. Tell people that come here from every state imaginable not to let these fish get in your waters because once you do, they're out of control and you're stuck with them. On the Mississippi River, they have become public enemy number one. There has never been a fish more in need of a public relations campaign than Asian carp. The advancing Asian carp are only a hundred kilometers from the Great Lakes. Can they be stopped? The Great Lakes are the largest freshwater system on earth and they're being threatened by a potentially catastrophic invasion. Asian carp are basically knocking on the Great Lakes door. They are one of the biggest threats the Great Lakes is facing right now and in order to deal with this threat, we need to be proactive and prevent their arrival and their establishment in the Great Lakes. These interconnected waters are brimming with plant and animal life and this is all now at risk from Asian carp. The Great Lakes are subject to stresses from every corner. The more stress you heap upon the Great Lakes, the more likely it is that the whole system is just going to break down. Asian carp could well be the stress that the Great Lakes can't handle. At the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Burlington, Ontario, research biologist Becky Cudmore is preparing for the coming attack of this scaly intruder. I find Asian carp a fascinating species to work on. I do admire their ability to adapt and to survive, but that doesn't mean that I want them here in Canada. I was driven home when I got to see them in action on the Mississippi River Basin. The vast number of species, the volume, the jumping behavior, it was horrifying. For every ten fish pulled from that area, nine of them are Asian carp. They really do overtake the system and they push out native species. For an Asian carp, the Great Lakes could be a great place to live. What we have in abundance in the Canadian Great Lakes are a lot of rivers and tributaries that attach to the Great Lakes and this will provide suitable spawning habitat for Asian carp to spawn and establish. So the fact that they're heading that way really does cause us a lot of concern. We expect the consequences to be quite dire. Canada and the U.S. cannot work separately on this issue. The Great Lakes are shared and this is a threat that's of concern to both countries. Keeping a close eye on this threat is Chicago's Great Lakes Alliance. It's a non-profit agency devoted to protecting and restoring the Great Lakes. Over the last century, the Great Lakes have experienced a number of invasions that rank above the others. Species like the sea lamprey, the zebra mussel, that have really thrown the ecosystem for a loop. The Asian carp rank in that category. Canada's battle is shared because the watersheds are connected just south of Chicago. It's there that Lake Michigan connects to the Mississippi watershed. It wasn't always this way. Before Chicago was settled, you had this slope that kept Great Lakes water going one direction and Mississippi River water going the other. And what that also did, besides keeping the water separate, is it kept the fish and wildlife of those two systems separate. In 1900, Chicago's pollution was festering in Lake Michigan. So American ingenuity created canals to connect the lake to the Illinois River. This allowed the water to flow downstream, sending Chicago's waste toward the Mississippi River. The consequence of that choice is becoming apparent now in the 21st century and we're facing a crisis of invasive species that are threatening to pollute the Great Lakes and Mississippi River in a way that we didn't even think about in 1889. These canals gave a free pass to invasive species by connecting the entire Central North American water system. For example, the invasive zebra mussel has migrated from the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Gulf of Mexico in only 25 years. If you wanted to cause an invasion of the Great Lakes, I can't think of a better way to do that than to build a 100-foot-wide canal running freely between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. That's what we have right now in Chicago. But these waterways were just waiting to be exploited by any cunning fish that could accidentally be introduced. And that's exactly what happened when Asian carp were brought in from China to clean up fish ponds. Entrepreneurial folks brought in this fish that eats algae in an attempt to clean out fish ponds. What happened, not surprisingly, was that these fish escaped and pretty soon you had wild populations of carp establishing in the lower Mississippi. In the early 1990s, a series of floods along the Mississippi swamped fish farms and thousands more Asian carp escaped into the river. And what we've seen over the last several decades is those populations doing what they naturally do, migrating to new places and eventually threatening to close in on Lake Michigan. The United States Geological Survey Research Facility is in Columbia, Missouri. The team is working hard to seek solutions to the carp scourge. Nobody knows the Asian carp better than aquatic biologist Dwayne Chapman. We've got a project next spring where we need to be able to spawn fish. So what we're going to do today is try to catch some spawner Asian carp. I do believe that controlling the carp is a matter of knowing thy enemy. And that has been my biggest goal in this whole thing is to understand the carp as fully as a person can understand the carp. They've always been an amazing organism to me. We'll have to get some more water in this. Now that we've got this problem, it's been an asset to be able to have a long-term relationship with these fish, so to speak. The Asian carps, you might say, they each have their own superpower. There are nine members of the carp family tree. Five of them have invaded North America. The common carp is an omnivore. It was introduced to North America in the 1800s and has been here ever since. The grass carp is a voracious eater of vegetation. The rare black carp crushes mollusks in its horse-like teeth. The two carp that are getting the most attention are the bighead and silver carp. They're relentless filter feeders that can eat 20% of their body weight a day and can grow up to more than 50 kilograms. The most notorious family member is the silver carp. It has super-sensitive skin and hearing, so when it's startled, it leaps out of the water like an Olympic jumper. Silver carp respond to nearly any stimulus that scares them, and they get scared by nearly any stimulus, by going airborne. They really are strong fish. They can jump high, and they kind of feed off each other in this response. You know, one fish starts jumping and scares another one, and they all start jumping, and it gets out of hand pretty quick, and it can be dangerous if you're out there in a boat. They are highly, highly specialized fishes, but they seem to be highly adaptable, and they do it really, really well. Just one buffalo? Yeah, the other one got out. Oh, that's good. Of all their superpowers, it's their ability to reproduce that's truly amazing. You'll note today that of all the fish that we caught, only one fish was a native fish. Every other fish we caught was an Asian carp. This vial, if you can look close at that, has about 3,000 tiny baby Asian carps that were all caught in one pull of a plankton net. And this one is the native fish that we caught out of the same haul, and there's probably about 100 fish in this vial. So this is the problem we're up against. The fecundity of these Asian carps is extremely high. A fish this size would probably produce at least a quarter million eggs a year. Carp have a lifespan of decades, so each one has the potential to produce an extended family in the millions. When they aren't breeding, these fish are eating. They vacuum up massive amounts of plankton every day. These are the gill rakers of a silver carp. The red part is the part the fish breeds with. This part on the inside, this increases surface area. Right in here, this is where the food collects. Then, once the food gets into the throat of the fish, there are teeth back here. These teeth right here, right against the plate in the roof of the mouth, and that's how the fish breaks apart the cells that it feeds on. It feeds on plankton, really, really, really small stuff. They don't have a stomach at all. If you look at this gut, how long it wraps back and forth and back and forth. This gut is very full, and if you look at the fat on here, this fish is doing very well. This white is fat. The green is, you're seeing the algae that this fish is feeding on through the intestine. Now, if you look at this volume of gut, there's a lot of food in there. A silver carp can, if conditions are right, can eat up to more than 20% of its body weight in a day. That is an awful lot of plankton. The river food chain contains plankton and fish of different sizes, and they all depend on each other. But the hungry Asian carp throws this out of balance by gobbling up the mid-sized plankton. Native fish can't compete. The smallest plankton starts to grow out of control, creating algae blooms and murky water. This leads to reduced biodiversity and poor water visibility. So you end up with this really densely green water that doesn't have any food in it that other fish can eat, and that's the problem. Fish like steelhead trout and salmon need to see what's on the menu. And Asian carp are always on the hunt for where their next meal is coming from, so they're swimming north looking for new habitat. Their main entry into the Great Lakes would be the Chicago canals. There's an expensive and ambitious proposal to slam the door shut on them. It's called hydrologic separation. When we talk about hydrologic separation of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River, what we mean is very simple. No water flowing between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. We built a canal 100 years ago that connected those two systems in a way that nature never intended. This monumental plan would completely close the Chicago canal system. All shipping cargo would have to be lifted over these barriers to make sure that no Asian carp could travel north to Lake Michigan. But this is already controversial. It's no quick fix, and before completion, untold numbers of carp could have snuck in. Hydrologic separation would have a huge economic impact on the barge industry. Yearly, it moves over 600 million tons of freight, including petroleum, coal, grain, and steel. Del Wilkins represents the thousands who depend on open waterways for their living. In the beginning of this whole issue, I didn't hear anybody talking about the impact to the marine industry and the other industries that depend on this. It's a very viable and robust industry throughout the inland waterway system and the coastal ports of our country. 15,000 barges industry-wide, about 4,000 to 5,000 boats. Numbers of employment could be upwards of hundreds of thousands of people. The industry recognizes that the influx of the invasive species is a problem. Do I think that hydrological separation is a solution? Sure. I mean, anything could be a solution. The question really becomes, what is the viability? Is the infrastructure really ready to be able to handle that transplant of tons that currently move by water to other modes? These waterways feed the North American economy by providing cheap transportation. Barges use only 4 liters of fuel to move a ton of freight over 900 kilometers. This makes them the most environmentally friendly way to move materials great distances. Once you handle those tons with another means, you've added additional costs. So the real question becomes, how many more costs in a global economy can the producer and the receiver sustain and accept before we just don't become economically viable? But even with the canals closed off, Asian carp could still enter the Great Lakes by hitching a ride with boaters through flooding or with birds. We keep focusing on the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal and the Manmade Canal as being the only source. It's important to look at all of the pathways and all of the potential means of allowing this invasive species to go between the watersheds. 25% of the world's freshwater is the Great Lakes. Who wouldn't want to protect that? But we want to protect it where you have the economy and the environment being inexorably linked, both win, not a win-lose. The fact remains, though, that the canal system is the main invasion route. Now there are other ways that these fish could be moving between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River. None of them is as high risk as the Chicago Canal system. We've got to be vigilant about those other connections. We've got to address them. But we've got to maintain a focus on the Chicago Canals because that is the far and away most likely way that these fish could invade the Great Lakes. With the case of the Asian carp, we are literally watching a new invasion happen. We're watching it approach the Great Lakes. We have the best predictive power we've ever had for a new invasion, and we've got to use that time to solve the problem. Asian carp are a mighty foe. This battle demands creativity from scientists to even the military. But can we outsmart a fish? The relentless Asian carp now rules large stretches of the Mississippi watershed. With the Great Lakes in their sights, the problem has become urgent. So all levels of government have joined forces in their fight against a fish. Windy City, entering the fish barrier, northbound light boat. Entering the fish barrier, northbound light boat, Windy City. Ground zero in the fight is just 50 kilometers south of Lake Michigan. The Army Corps of Engineers are on carp patrol 24 hours a day. The Asian carp are clearly something we need to take seriously. The engineering community, the science community, is looking at everything and anything to ensure that this is an effective deterrent. This is a one-of-a-kind technology. This deterrent uses electricity to repel fish, just like an electric fence. The barrier will emit electric pulses into the waterway system. Those pulses will come out of a series of electrodes that are laying on the bottom of the canal itself. You would not want to put your hands in the water. There is threat of shock. Three sets of electrodes each produce a successively stronger electronic pulse. The first cable emits a low-energy field that makes most carp uncomfortable enough to turn around. The pulses from the second cable are more powerful in repelling the fish. The third cable will knock them unconscious. These fish drift downstream to revive unharmed. One concern is that baby Asian carp might be able to sneak past the barrier in between barges. To monitor whether this is possible, some fish are wired with radio transmitters and tracked. We have a series of sensors throughout the canal, all the way back down into the Illinois River system, that can track their movement up to the front line of our aquatic dispersal barrier. And in every case, we have seen them turn around. While zapping the fish appears to be working for now, it has yet to be tested on the full onslaught of fish that biologists are battling downstream. The key to fighting carp is knowing thy enemy. The rivers of Illinois are continually monitored to compare the population sizes of native fish versus carp invaders. Asian carp have an amazing ability to avoid nets, which makes them hard to catch. For biologists like Nerissa Michaels, that also makes them pretty tough to count. Crews use electrofishing, which sends a strong enough charge into the water to stun the fish so they can be examined and counted. We found the adult silver carp population to be about 4,000 fish per river kilometer. And that equals out to about 8 metric tons per river kilometer. This is a smallmouth buffalo, but the bigmouth buffalo directly compete for food with the silver carp. Asian carp are very successful in the Illinois River. They're very good at what they do, and with the Illinois River Basin being so productive with the nutrients and phytoplankton and zooplankton, it's like a smorgasbord for them here. You can't really predict the future, and it's difficult to tell with an invasive species because they don't act like any other species, and it depends on which system they invade. You know, with the Great Lakes, if what happens up there is anything like what's happened down here, then it could be catastrophic. With Asian carp established in these numbers, their removal is impossible. The goal of the government scientists is to find ways to control fish behavior, to herd or repel them in ways that will reduce their populations. Though mighty, Asian carp have a surprising vulnerability. They're extremely sensitive to sound and vibration. It makes them downright jumpy. The intent of the water gun project is to identify the minimum sound pressure levels that will cause fish to basically change their behavior. So this is the experimental pond where we'll be doing the research with silver carp and bighead carp to understand how do they respond to the water gun being fired underwater. This right here is one of the smaller water guns. It's a one-cubic-inch water gun. So this will be suspended in the pond. We'll provide high-pressure air lines to it. When the gun is fired, that air expands rapidly, and it forces a traveler to move down through the gun, and then it causes that shock wave or that cavitation in the water column to send out a sound pressure wave through the water body. Researchers are trying to find out if a specific sound wave can consistently repel carp. If successful, then small water guns could block entrances to their favorite spawning grounds. Both silver carp and bighead carp are very responsive to vibrations in the water column, so we think that they're going to be pretty susceptible to water guns and other sound technologies. As scientists race to control the fish, others have decided to take matters into their own hands in a rather unscientific way. The scrappy town of Bath, Illinois, has decided to fight back with its Redneck Fishing Tournament. But this tournament is really a fish cull dressed up as a contest. We started seeing these fish about ten years ago. And eight years ago, we took a boat ride, and these things started jumping out of the water. Unbelievable. It's just like popcorn flying out of the water from every direction. And at the end of it, we had 32 of these bloody, slimy fish, and I thought they were going to sink our 16-foot john boat. And I said, that's it. That's enough. And so we developed a war on the carp. Betty created this tournament to try to rid her river of slimy invaders. A hundred kilogram flying silver carp had made it too scary for families to maintain their boating culture. This is something in a small community like this, that's what you have. You have your resources here. You have the water. You teach your kids to fish and swim and have a good time. We can't do that here anymore. It's very dangerous to take little ones out there. That's the main reason for this tournament. It's not a moneymaker. It's not. It has never been that. It's to educate the public about what is going on with these fish and to tell people that come here from every state imaginable not to let these fish get in your waters, because once you do, they're out of control. And you're stuck with them. The dead fish tally is 10,000. But every single person at this tournament is still outnumbered 100 to 1 by Asian carp. You come here, you see it firsthand, but go back and tell wherever you're from. I don't care if you have to talk to your senators, your DNR, your conservation, wherever you have to go. You tell them to stop them now. Don't let them in your waters. But could such relentless invaders be stopped in their tracks by something as simple as a magic pill? Central Illinois' Lake Peoria is now infested with Asian carp, and they're not leaving anytime soon. Instead of giving up, two local entrepreneurs are focusing on a new sports fishery. The waterways here are a living, breathing thing. These fish, when they jump and they land in your boat, they'll slime your boat, but they'll also bleed naturally out of the gills, and they'll defecate. People just don't want to deal with it. The Peoria carp hunters offer up the thrill of aerial bow fishing tours. They're actually a real pretty fish. In the can he goes, about a billion more to go. That's it, let's go. Their gonzo approach to fishing has made them YouTube superstars. The second I saw my first fish jump out of the water, I ran back home and got my bow fishing bow, and came out and was hooked ever since. It started getting too dangerous to where we just had a choice, you know, either stop doing it or adapt. And then we said, well, you know, while these fish are flying out of the water and hitting us, we might as well make them pay for doing it. The carp dicer. The barbed batterer. The dream catcher. A lot of time people just ask me, is it fake? And I have to tell them, no, it's the real deal. These fish are really jumping like that, and they're jumping that high. They think it's funny, but we're wearing shin guards, helmets, shoulder pads, and we're not just doing it because it looks funny, we're doing it because you have to. You know, getting hit in the face by something that big, going real fast in a boat, can and will kill you. I would be lying to you if I said we're putting a dent in the carp population. All we're doing here is we're turning lemons into lemonade. What my videos and, you know, business actually accomplishes is raising the awareness. At least I can get people out there on the river, they can see for themselves the total chaos that these fish have caused. Certainly there are huge numbers of Asian carp, but are brute force and sledgehammer solutions the best controls? Government scientists are looking at ideas that could be a real endgame for the carp. If we applied poisons like rotenone or anamycin to a large water body, we would likely kill most of the fish, if not all the fish that are present in that water body. Understanding its physiology is helping scientists to develop a custom-made pill that would only harm an Asian carp. The Holy Grail might be developing a technology or a tool that could, when it's applied to water, only impact silver carp and bighead carp and not impact any native species. Silver carp and bighead carp have an Achilles heel. They have a very extensively developed set of gill rakers. And so we're trying to turn that advantage that they have against them. This smart pill is now being tested. It's a microparticle designed to be trapped in the carp's gills, but will be filtered out by native fish. This pill technology would be loaded with different types of ammunition that would harm the fish. The control agent could be a virus, it could be a bacterium, it could be a vaccine. It could be whatever we come up with that might cause some negative effect on silver carp or bighead carp that doesn't allow them to have that competitive advantage that they seem to have right now. But questions remain about what happens to other aquatic life and birds when the poisoned carp decompose. We also need to understand what the degradation rate is of that control agent so that when it comes out in the water, it's going to get broken down and degraded over a certain period of time. We're talking about ways that we can control or manage silver carp and bring their levels down to a level that our natural resources can handle. If the environmental cost is too high, what else might be used against them? Asian carp do seem to have superpowers, but they also have super voracious appetites, appetites that might lure them away from breeding grounds. Biologists are studying which foods produce the strongest responses in the fish. What our objective is is to get the fish from this side of the chamber down to this side of the chamber. And what we do is we put Asian carp in here. We've got water coming in from both ends of the chamber, forming a gradient which drains from the center. After we've let the fish acclimate for a period of 45 minutes to an hour, then we come in and we start introducing a food stimulus. The enticement used in this experiment is highly concentrated algae, the scientists predict it will be their favorite. So what we want to do is to see how the fish respond to that. We hope that the fish, that they'll move down past the gradient and start actively feeding where the stimulus is entering into the system. Hopefully they'll maintain their position in this side of the chamber. How's it looking? Software tracks the location of the fish, with each one indicated in a different color. This creates a map of their movements and their choices. It's clear the allure of fine dining has dramatic power over them. This is actually really encouraging, you know. With this just being a preliminary trial, we're getting good response. With the food attractant, we were getting a prolonged response, up to an hour in some cases. It's been very consistent in all of our experimental trials. So we're hoping to focus on the food attractants as a potential control strategy. There's no single solution that will control Asian carp populations. Tempting treats could be a promising addition to an arsenal of weapons. This, along with smart pills and water guns, might finally affect the carp population. So here we have Lake Erie. And this is one of the lakes predicted to be the most suitable for Asian carp. Becky Cudmore, at Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans, knows a carp invasion could explode at any time. This department has to be constantly vigilant or the cause will be lost. Well, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has a new Asian carp program that really does focus on prevention. And one of the things that we are planning to do is setting up early detection sites around the Great Lakes. And in doing so, we hope to catch them as soon as possible when we have the best chance of doing something about it. There are numerous physical entry points connecting the Mississippi River Basin and the Great Lakes Basin. The most likely entry would be the Chicago Canal system. That's very close to an established, thriving carp population. And they would love the Great Lakes. They would find Lake Erie particularly attractive. It is shallow, it is warm, it is productive. And that means that there is a lot of food. Recent large algae blooms in Lake Erie have created great concern that this food source could fuel an Asian carp population. It would only take a few fish for an invasion to start. What we feel is that it would take ten females and a similar number of males meeting in the same area to establish a population. And maybe at first glance you think, well, the Great Lakes are quite huge, how would these species find each other? Well, they do cue in to suitable spawning habitat. And when that happens, they have lots of babies. Asian carp grow to a large size very quickly. In that sense, they outgrow any potential predators. So they can accumulate large numbers very quickly. In doing so, they can take over a space, pushing out our native species. Things like walleye yellow perch, and we do rely on those for our commercial fishery. Unlike native species, the Asian carp's greatest weapon may be its adaptability. Studies show that if plankton is scarce in the Great Lakes, it can feed from an unlikely source, the zebra mussel, a Great Lakes aquatic invader. Zebra mussels secrete waste, which builds up on the lake bed. It's a huge organic meal that's too tempting for a hungry carp. In fact, we're finding that if Asian carp can consume the biological waste of zebra mussels, they will actually thrive in the Great Lakes. Another adaptive trait that Asian carp possess is the ability to interbreed between the species when populations are low. So when bighead and silver carp can't find partners, they're happy to date each other. This helps their populations to grow quickly. People look at Asian carp and think ugly, dumb fish, but these are really smart fish. They're net avoiders. They will eat whatever they need to in order to survive. And they're great swimmers, so I think that people underestimate Asian carp. So while we're focused on Great Lakes as a potential first point of entry to Canadian waters, all of Canadian waters are at risk. Bighead and silver carp are not only native to Asia, they're also native to Russia. They are a cold water species as well. Temperature would not limit their survival. Computer models show that once Asian carp have a beachhead in any of the Great Lakes, over the next 20 to 30 years, they would spread as far north as the 60th parallel. And with global warming, this range could be even larger. But the good news, and there is some, Canada is being aggressive in this fight against aquatic invaders showing up in the Great Lakes. Canada would be very different, the fisheries would be very different, and our ecosystems would be different. It's one of the reasons why we are working so hard to prevent these species from entering. So water temperature is 3 degrees Celsius, and turbidity is 3.0 NTUs. But what if the carp are already an occupying force? Finding the genetic material of Asian carp in lake water could be evidence that carp have already arrived and are establishing colonies. Environmental DNA technology could help, but it's still not 100% reliable. All environmental DNA is really going to tell you is the presence of DNA. It doesn't tell you whether or not the actual animal is present in the system. That DNA could have come from other sources. Carp DNA can be carried in the feces of a bird, in a bait bucket, or even smeared on the side of a canal barge. Once you understand the amount of DNA that's actually being potentially transferred into that system, you can then monitor that over time and see changes in the amount of DNA which would suggest that you may actually in fact have an invasion taking place within that system. What you're actually seeing here is a positive environmental DNA sample. These here very bright bands are DNA that's extracted directly from the silver carp. These bands here, this one, this one, this one, and this one, are the positive detections from the water sample that was collected. eDNA is a tool that we can use for early detection, but it will work best in areas where we know that a positive sample really would suggest a live Asian carp, and that the genetic material wouldn't be there for any other reason. If we're able to find Asian carp early enough, and the numbers are a few, I think our success rate for eradicating them from the system increases greatly. Preventing carp from establishing a population is the only way to protect the Great Lakes. It's a job that may never end. In the Mississippi watershed where all hope seems lost, the Asian carp infestation may be solved in a surprisingly simple way. Stopping Asian carp from taking over the Great Lakes is about more than just blocking waterways. There is a real risk that live fish could accidentally be released by humans on the Canadian side of the border. Those fish might have superpowers, but on dry land fighting back are our own super sleuths from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. Within the greater Toronto area, we focus our attention on monitoring the buying and selling and possessing of invasive species, specifically live invasive species. Any fish or fish product that comes from a freshwater source, we'll go in and we'll conduct inspections, we'll look at paperwork, that type of thing. There are four species of Asian carp that cannot be bought, sold or possessed live. We will ensure that wholesalers or markets are aware of the situation and that we will inspect the fish that they have in their inventory. Okay, we're just going to dip the tanks a bit here, see what you got. I believe that the wholesalers, the restaurants, the markets, they do have a better understanding of the laws and as a result, I think they are working with us and trying hard to be in compliance with the laws that we enforce. The fear remains that a live carp could be used to stock a pond and someday escape, or that a live unwanted fish could be discarded into the sewer system. Either way would be like handing over the keys to the Great Lakes. Certainly there's a concern if live Asian carp ended up in a store, there is always a possibility that a store could turn around and sell that fish live. And if that were the case, there is certainly potential for them to spread throughout the watershed. When this water gets warm, you got to be careful. They get real active when the water's warm. That's pig head right there. Nice. That's grass. To these inspectors, the only good carp is a dead one. We're looking at a freezer, okay? So this is dead grass carp. This is perfectly legal. In a live state, obviously, this is one of our four invasive species of Asian carp. But what I'm looking at here doesn't alarm me at all. This is completely legal for them to have this. It's something that requires monitoring and supervision. But in the markets and the GTA, we have not seen a live Asian carp since 2009. We have, in 2012, stopped three trucks coming across the border. They are all before the courts right now. So we certainly still see offenses, but not the degree and the volumes of offenses that we saw back in 2005, 2006. There are no unified laws in Canada covering the sale of live Asian carp. But many provinces and states have banned its sale and transport outright. In the United States, the carp population is already firmly established. But in a town where adversity is no stranger, a solution is on the table. Peoria, Illinois' Southside Mission sits in one of the poorest zip codes in the United States. The people that we serve on the Southside of Peoria are the first people that feel the pains of a bad economy and the last people that feel any sort of recovery. The Southside of Peoria is a food desert. And for those that don't know what that means, it means it's a place where the poor cannot receive fresh vegetables and quality food. The irony is that in a so-called food desert, the poor go hungry when there is a source of free, high-quality protein just a kilometer away. If we had a reliable way to have our hands on Asian carp each month, we would absolutely integrate it into our menu, and it could feed thousands. Because our resources are limited, we rely mainly on donations. We have a very limited budget, so anytime there's a protein source out there that we can utilize, it greatly helps our ministries. Keep your knife angled down towards the rib cage. It is a very bony fish, and the bones are very prevalent all throughout the fillet. So it is hard to use it like you would a regular fillet of fish. The bones right now, we don't worry about a whole lot because you're not going to get them. They're all in here. They'll come out real easy after you cook them. You want to try the other side? The challenge is harvesting the Asian carp, and then just the processing of it. There needs to be a commercial way of processing it so it can be used readily. Not a whole lot of yield there, is there? No. There's a lot of labor involved, but the little amount of fish. You do get off it as a very good product. Three Hours Northwest in Fulton, Illinois, is one of the few commercial harvesters of Asian carp in North America. When the Asian carp started to diminish the native fishery, shafers did their homework. They saw opportunity and created jobs. There's a definite need for cheap protein in the world. And this fish is very plentiful, very sustainable. Carp is considered a trash fish in North America. It has a lot of bones in the meat, and no young person in America is going to eat fish with bones in it. They want a boneless fillet, white-meated fillet. In other parts of the world, people still eat fish with bones in it. So that's where our main markets are headed. Shafers ships Asian carp as whole fish all over the world and to ethnic markets in North America. To encourage a mainstream domestic market, they have created tasty carp-based products such as salami, hot dogs, jerky, and carp cakes. The most popular right now is gefilte fish, and I think fish patties will be our next biggest item that we make out of it. This fish could potentially feed a lot of people that are in need in this country as well as other countries. It could create a lot of jobs for people that are down and out. Getting North America to see Asian carp as a sustainable resource may be a matter of marketing. There has never been a fish more in need of a public relations campaign than Asian carp. I would say that people are universally surprised. After they've had Asian carp and then you tell them what it was, they had no idea that's what they were eating. They would have assumed it to be crab cake or a tilapia. It's very good. That's not that Asian carp we had. That's exactly what it is. If you can treat the Asian carp as a resource instead of a pariah, you could affect change throughout food insecure communities. I'd love to see Asian carp available in local grocery stores very cheap and then turn this problem into a tasty solution. It's surprising that Asian carp, which are thought of as such a curse, could turn out to be a blessing. Asian carp would not be in North America if humans had not introduced them in the first place. It's important to remember that everything's native somewhere. And, you know, these are not evil fish. Many people would say that the most successful invasive species in the world is a human being. The ability to make any environment their own has earned carp the distinction of being a hated but respected aquatic species. Efforts to control them will cost billions of dollars. We are literally staring down the maw of a new invasive species. We know what's coming. We know how to solve the problem. And if we don't take advantage of that, it's going to be game over for the Great Lakes. I don't know if people should panic, but people should be concerned and join us in the fight to prevent them from entering the Great Lakes. My message to the people that live around the Great Lakes is I don't know how you're going to get these fish to stop coming up there, because they're going to. They're going to migrate. They're going to go up there. If there's any way possible to keep them out of the Great Lakes, stop them now. I do have kind of a love-hate relationship with these fish. I respect the heck out of them. They are amazing fish. I just wish they weren't here.