Keep your Carp!
U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan told the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Michigan (and supported by several other Great Lakes states) that requests the shipping locks in Chicago be closed in an effort to keep Asian Carp (seen here, thanks to the EPA's website dedicated to this issue) from entering the Great Lakes.
Kagan (and the other groups opposed to the lawsuit, which includes the state of Illinois and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,) cite concerns that closing the locks would endanger human safety (the Coast Guard uses the locks during emergency responses to recreational boating emergencies), and inflict significant cost on the cargo shipping industry in Illinois.
This opposition seems to be discounting the incredible economic damage that will be inflicted on the $7 Billion-dollar Great Lakes fishing industry when the carp take up residence in our freshwater lakes and bays and displace the salmon and lake trout.
Despite the fact that DNA evidence of the carp has been found within six miles of Lake Michigan, Kagan announced that there was “insufficient evidence that enough carp had slipped past the electric barrier to pose an imminent danger”, and stated that “the best information available today does not yet justify the dramatic steps Michigan demands.”
How much evidence do we need?
This is a ravenous fish that, in the last 20 years, has escaped from aquaculture ponds in the south and migrated thousands of miles north, eating everything in its path. It eats 40 percent of its weight in aquatic vegetation every day, decimating the food supply of other smaller fish and completely upsetting the food chain when it moves into an area.
The carp have already made it past the electric barrier in the Chicago shipping canal, and seemed to emerge unscathed from a massive poisoning done in the canal while the barrier was under construction. The lawsuit filed by Michigan is in no way overly dramatic in its response to this imminent threat; if anything it is too little too late, as we have been watching the steady approach of this invasive fish for years.
