Fish farms to blame for Asian carp threat to Great Lakes

Asian carp are the next great threat to the Great Lakes, but how exactly did this happen?

Did someone with a personal vendetta against sports fishermen plant them in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal? Did they swim across the ocean and all the way up the mighty Mississippi just to make headlines?

The real answer starts with the aquatic equivalent to factory farms. Instead of braving the ocean blue to make their catches, the seafood industry now simply grows fish in big ponds.

To make a long story short, the rains came down and the floods came up and the Asian carp made it into the watershed. From their, they’ve found their way up the Mississippi River and are now a few short miles from Lake Michigan.

Most recently, scientists found Asian carp’s DNA on the wrong side of a multi-million dollar electric barrier created to keep invasive species out of the lakes.

Growing fish like canned sardines makes for some pretty filthy water. And here’s where our buddy the Asian carp comes in. Fish farms in the southern United States brought in Asian carp to eat the masses of parasites and snails growing in their water. Unfortunately, the same thing that made the huge, jumping carp useful for fish farmers makes them a threat to the Great Lakes ecosystem, because they will eat plankton other fish rely on.

If Asian carp indeed have beaten the barrier, the only thing stopping them from reaching Lake Michigan is a navigational lock. Many environmentalists are now calling for those locks to be shut down until the Asian carp are somehow taken care of.

This is terrible news for fishermen, but more so for the Asian carp’s underwater rivals. The carps – which can grow up to 100 pounds – could easily deplete the food supply relied on by salmon, trout and sturgeon.

And who is paying for the Army Corps of Engineers to try and fix this problem? Taxpayers. Not, of course, the farmers who started all the trouble.