A REPOMER AT LARCE

Jn the Shedd Aquarium, on the lake-Ifront in downtown Chicago, there's a

video display that makes visitors laughuntil theyre falling down. The video is inanareaofthe aquarium devoted to inva-sive species, and it shows slvet carp (H1t-pophthalmichthys nolitrix), a fish orig-inally from China and eastern Siberia,jumping in the Illinois River near Peoria"A peculiarity of silver caqp is that whenthey are alarmed by potential predatorsthey leap from the water, sometimesrocketing fifteen feet into the air. In thevideo, several people are cruising in a

small motorboat below the spiJl.vay of alock or a dam while fish fly ail around.The people get hit in the arms, the back,the sides. They're ducking theyre yelling,the silver caqp are flyng, the boat is swerv-ing. Aquarium visitors whoop and wipethe tears away andwatch the video again.

The invasion of Asian calp into thewaters of the South and the Midwestdiffers from other ongoing environmen-tal problems in that it slaps you in thehead. Videos like the one in the Sheddare the reason a lot ofpeople know aboutAsian ca1p. Not only are the newcomersupsetting the balance in mid-countryecosystems; they are knocking boaters'glasses offand breaking their noses andchipping their teeth and leaving bodybruises in the shape offish. So far, appar-endy, there have been no fatalities. Andwhile threats to the environment tendto be ignorable (ifonlyin the shor run),this one is not, because millions of peo-ple go boating and the novelty of beinghit by a fish wears offfast.

Right now there are actually fwokinds ofAsian calp to wolTy about: silvercarp and their non-jumping compan-ions, bighead carp (Hypophthalmichthysnobilis). Bigheads, which can grow to ahundred pounds, are bigger than silvers.Neither really has the appearance of aca{p, because their mouths are not the

FIJH OUT OF V\TSNTbe Asian-carp inoasion.

BY IAN FRAZIER

downward-pointing mouths of bottom-feeding fish. Unlike the common carp,which we think of as an American fishalthough it was introduced here in theeighteen-eighties, silver carp and bigheadcarp feed not on the bottom but in thetop few feet of the water column. Theseca{p eat only plankton, which they fi1terfrom the water with rakers in their giJls.They are highly efficient feeders, outcon-suming other fish and leaving less for thefry of such game fish as bass, crappies,and walleyes. The fear is that when theyget in a lake or a river you will soon havenothing else.

In the U.S., the Asian carp startedtheir journey from a place of formerlyominous reputation: Down the River. Aslong ago as the nineteen-seventies, big-heads and silvers escaped into the lowerMississippi River from waste-treatmentplants and commercial catfish ponds inArkansas and Mississippi. Down Souththey were worker fish, imported to cleanup enclosed areas by eating algae. Pre-sumably, Mississippi River floods gavethem the chance to get away. Once atlarge, the caqp headed north, eventuallyturning up in the Missouri, the Tennes-see, the Ohio, the Des Moines, the Wa-bash, the Illinois. For the long term, theyseem to have their sights set on Canada.Today, just a few decades after their es-cape, they are aLmost there.

Not to get too sentimental about it,but the Mississippi River is us, and viceversa. It's our bloodsffeam. Last summerI was driving along the river in westernIllinois thinking how horible the Mis-sissippi had been iately, with its outsizedfloods and its destruction of New Or-leans, and I noted the recent flooding stillin progress along the Illinois shore-the miles ofroads and fields submerged,and the ferry landing at Golden Eagle,Illinois, now separated from dry landby seventy feet of mud and water, and

1ow-lying parking lots fi.rll of river mudcracked Jike pieces of ajigsaw pruzle otrT-ing in the sun. In the sprawl of standingwater over parts of the landscape no ac-tual river could be found. Then the roadI was on descended from a ridge to themostly unflooded river town of Ham-burg, Illinois, and the Mississippi itselfwas running fast beside the main street,and just across the shining expanse werethe houses and church steeples on theMissouri side. An old and powerfi-rl emo-tion hit me; my blood leaned with thecurrent and I let the recriminations go by.

The fact that Asian ca{p are now inthis river and many others, sucking inplankton and growing big and repro-ducing and waiting to smack aJet Skielsface, is really not good. Possibly, thesecarp will changl: luge parts of our na-tional watersli::r11, 1l,rurr.r. We may beinfected with a vir..rs for which there isno cure.

I mong Asian-carp-infested rivers,

-{ \the lllinois has ir worsr of all. Thisriver is formed by the junction of theKankakee and the Des Plaines aboutfifty miles southwest of downtownChicago. It runs at a diagonal paftwayacross the state and then turns duesouth, rneeting the Mississippi north ofSt. Louis" Via the Des Plaines, most ofthe treatedwaster,vater of Chicago flowssouth into the ll1inois. It's the main in-dustrial river of the state. The fields ofcorn and soybeans through which itpasses are the factory floor, the river isthe conveyor. Ifthere's any stretch ofthis river that doesn't hum and throb-with barges, tLrgs, grain elevators, powerplants, coal depots, refineries-I didntsee it.

One morning inAugustl was fishingin the Illinois by the boat{aunch rampin a riverfront park in Havana, Illinois, a

to'*'n whose {Lll name is pieasant to say.

From the commercial cntf.sh ponds ofArkansas and Mississippi, tbe carp bave sruum-ttnrl leaped-nearly to Lake Michigan

THE NEV YORKER, OCTOBER 25.2OIO

Not much water traffic was passing atthis early hour. A light breeze interferedwith the deep-green reflection of thetrees on the far shore, and the echoesof car tires rolling on the brick rampbounced off some barges parked overthere. Fish were rising near the bank inthe brown current. I cast to them with a

dry fly, but they wouldnt bite. Later, aguy in a sporting-goods store erplainedthat these were Asian carp feeding ongrain dust from the elevators upstream.In fact, because of the tininess of whatthey eat, Asian carp are almost impossi-ble to catch with hook and [ne.

I quit fishing as the sun rose abovethe trees and the day became stifling.Two fishermen came to the boat launchfrom upriver in an eighteen-foot bass boatwith a twenty-five-horsepower outboard.They had on camo hats and bluejean biboveralls. As theywere winching their boatonto the trailer one ofthem fanned him-selfwith his hat and yelled to me, "Hey,turn dornar the heatl" I went ovEr and saidhello and asked howtheyhad done. Theyopened their cooler and showed me a

beautifirl catch ofcrappies and a medium-sized striped bass. I expressed surprise attheir success and said I had heard thatthe Asian calp had depieted this fishery.Not necessarily, the guys said, adding thatthere were so many litde Asian carp nowthat the other fish had more prey to feedon. I asked if they thought Asian carpwere a serious problem.

"Oh, hell yes, they're a problem," thesmaller of the two gr,rys said.'Theyjumpup and hit you all the time, and they getslime on you, and they shit all over yourboat. And bleed-oh, they bleed like nosonsabitches you've ever seen. Yesterday,a carp hitJunior in the chest-I thoughtitwould go into his bib--and it left a trailof shit and slime and blood all dov,n thefront ofhim."

"Hey, look-therds my nephewl" Ju-nior interrupted. A blue-and-white stripedtugboat was going by with a young fellowin jeans and a T-shirt standing in thewheelhouse at the top. "My nephe#s theyoungest pilot on the river-became a

pilot right out ofhigh school,"Junior said.

He and the other guywaved and the pilotwaved back, the happiest man in Illinois.A large American flag fluttered at thetugts stern. A11 around the boat, from theroiled wake and from the curls of foam atthe bow, carp of mint-bright silver wereleaping in the sun.

J n the parking lot of the local field sra-Ition of the lllinois Narural HisrorySurvey, just up from the boat launch,two big outboards with twin motorssat dripping on their trailers. After a

thorough hosing down, the boats sti1lsmelled of disinfectant, and a few fishscales clung to the aluminum structuresin their bows. At a desk in the field-station office, Matt O'Hara, a tall,broad-shouldered fish biologist who

had just come in from the river, sat andtalked with me, while at an adjoiningdesk a colleague talked to a film crewfrom an outdoor channel. Another re-porter and a film crewfrom ESPN wereexpected shortly. During a recent fishsurvey, Matt O'Hara said, so many fishjumped out of the river at the first joltof electroshocking that a camera fi1m-ing from the nearby shore was unable tosee the boat. In fact, the visual crazi-ness of the leaping-carp phenomenon,propagated in Internet videos, hadbeen drawing TV crews from all over.Dealing with crews from every majorchannel, from cable shows, and fromCanada, Russia, England, France, and

Japan had become part of these biolo-gists'job.

Their actual and more important jobis keeping track of what's in the river.North America's two largest watersheds,the Mississippi and the Great Lakes,connect in one place, Chicago. Boatstravel from the Adantic Ocean into theSt. Lawrence Seaway, go through thelakes, turn into the Chicago Sanitary andShip Canal, continue through the canalinto the Des Plaines River, enter the Illi-nois, and head onward from there tothe Mississippi and the Gdf of Mexico.This means, of course, that invasive spe-cies can travel the same route in eitherdirection. A11 of them must pass by theHavana field station's door, and MattO'Hara and others at the station checkthe river continually to see if they do.These days, the watchers' eyes are onthe Asian carp, whose dense popula-tion in the lllinois-eight thousand ormore silver czirp per river mile----cxerts aseemingly inexorable pressure north-ward, toward Chicago and the huge,Asian-carp-free (probably) watershedbeyond.

Like other scientists who grasp thethreat, Matt O'Hara becomes severewhen he talks about it, though in a quietand Midwestern way. "I don't know ifsilver carp and bighead carp would nec-essarily thrive in the Great Lakes," hetold me. "Lake Erie is one ofthe biggestfisheries in the world-the lakes to-gether are a seven-to-ten-billion-do11arfishery annually, and most of that catchis from Lake Erie-and it does look as

if the carp wouid do well in that partic-ular lake, and probably trash it. WhatI'm even more concerned about in the

'Yo u' o e go t t h o s e S tuc k- in - t h e - S u btt: ay - Lis te n i n g-to-a- Guy -Mas s acre-D1t lan B lue s. "

shorter run is the rivers. The Illinois be-came seriously infested just in the lastseven years. A study has identifiedtwenty-two rivers in the Great Lakessystem that might be as r,ulnerable as theIllinois. Some of these are major riverswith important salmon runs, like thePere Marquette and the Manistee, inMichigan. Asian carp in those riverscould become a disaster really fast.

'You can eat Asian carp, and theyregood. Score the fillets crossways with a

sharp knife and cook them in hot oi1,

and it dissolves a lot of the bones. Butgiven what they do to an ecosystem Ican't say I see any advantage at all withthese fish, definitely not if they get inthe lakes. They're terrible for the aes-thetics and they certainly make peopleleery ofgoing out in a boat. Even today,it is still legalto import bighead carp, al-though silvers are now illegal. Andthere's another kind of carp, the blackcarp, that's also in Southern catfishponds and is legal to import and couldbe an additional disaster if it movednorth. Black carp eat snails and musselsand would probably strip our nativemollusk and shellfish populations, withall kinds ofconsequences. That's a dan-ger people should think about, too. Weknew fifteen years ago the silvers andthe bigheads were going to be a prob-lem, but nothingwas done about them.Until recently, nobody paid attentionto catp."

\ 7t f.il, O.K.-lers eat them. This so-V V tuuon has alreadv occured to rhe

state oflllinois. Americans in general arenot keen on eating catp, so, looking else-where, the governor of Illinois recendyannounced an agreement to sell localcarp to the Chinese" Big River Fish Cor-poration, of Pearl, Illinois, would hawest,package, and ship carp to the BeijingZhouchen Animal Husbandry Com-pany, while the state would invest twomillion dollars in Big River to improve itsfacilities and processing capacity. TheChinese had already inspected the prod-uct and announced their complete satis-faction with "the wild Asian ca1p" of llli-nois. Zhouchen said it would buy thirrymillion pounds, and possibly more, bythe end of2071.

Pearl, Illinois, by the Illinois River inthe west-central part of the state, is onRoute 100 and has a hundred and

eighty-seven residents. A small postoffice makes up about a quarter of itsdowntown. Big River Fish, around abend on Route 100, announces itselfwith two hand-painted wooden signs,one facing north and one south, againstthe trunk of a maple tree. The signsshow the profile of a long-whiskeredcatfish done all in black and shades ofgray except for the hlpnotic yellow eye.

cle-rally food venders who also ink mul-timillion-dollar deals with the Chinese.

Mike Houston, a Big River em-ployee, was locking up as I arrived. Thecompany would close for about a wee(until the boss returned, he said. MikeHouston had a red porytai., grayhair atthe temples, blue eyes, a ginger-coloredbeard, a red Ohio State baseball cap,and a T-shirt with a saying about beer.Accompanying him was another em-ployee, awirybald manwith tattoos andawalus mustache. 'Yeah, we've alreadysold our first load of Asian carp to theChinese," A4ike Houston said. 'Theyrealso buyin'yellow carp, grass carp,catfish. Thirty mlllion pounds is a 1ot offish, but they say it will feed one city.We get the fish in the round-thatmeans whole-and then we gut'em andpower-wash the cavity. That cavitys gotto be completely clean before you canship'em. The Chinese want the carpwith the tails, heads, and scales still on.We flash-freeze'em in our forty-below-zero freeingchamber and then bag'emindividually and put'em in big plasticshipping bags that hold twelve or fifteenhundred pounds offish.

'lMdre expanding ow operation, butright nowwe can move a hell of a lot offish out of here. We can operate year-round, because there's no restrictionsand nobody cares how many carp youcatch. Guttin' these fish is hard work.Some of the Asian carp go fifty, sixtypounds. Just liftin' 'em is hard. I usedto be a cheN I can work a knife, and Ive

had days when I've gutted and washedtwenty thousand pounds of fish. TheseAsian carp, what they eat, basically, ismuck. You'd be surprised, though-their meat is all white meat, and it'sgood. I've eaten it. People say it's diffi-cult to find Asian carp in China becausethey're all fished out. I like to think,sellin' silver carp and bighead carp tothe Chinese, thatwdre sendiri their own

product back to'em. AndI'11 tellyou, even with all thefish we move, we ain'tmakin' a dent in the Asiancalp that's out there. f'herdscommercial 6shermen inHavana and in Beardstownthat we can call up and say

we need a hundred thou-sand pounds offish rightaway, and those boys can

get a hundred thousand pounds to us ina day or two. And a day or two iater theycan have a hundred thousand more. No,we ain't makin a dent."

tlah. town of Bath, nine miles southI of Havana on a long slough of the

Illinois, takes a sporting approach to theproblem. Every year in August, the BoatTavern, a waterfront bar in Bath, holdsa fishing tournament in which teams ofanglers catch silver carp. It's called theRedneck Fishing Tournament; the firstwas in 2004. Prizes are given for themost fish and the best costumes. Thisyear, a hundred and five boats (at a fifty-dollar entry Ge apiece) competed beforea crowd of about two thousand in theevent's two days. The method offishingwas straightforward: flush the carp fromthe water with boat engines and snatchthem from the air with nets. There wasalso barbecuing, beer drinking, kara-oke singing, games for children andteen-agers, bluegrass bands, booths sell-ing T-shirts, etc. Among the crowd,T-shirt adages were on the order of"Friends Don't Let Friends Fish Sober"and 'M{hat Happens in the Barn Staysin the Barn."

From the top of the boat ramp lead-ing to the event, the Redneck FishingTournament smelled like ketchup andmud. This was on Saturday afternoon,the event's peak. Spectators rnilled,media swarmed. At occurrences of evenslight interest, a forest of boom mikesconverged, whjle video carneras pointed

THE NEV YORKER, OCTOBER 25.2OIO 69

here and there promiscuously. A noticeon a telephone pole announced thatjustby entering the premises you were grant-ing a production company called LeftlRight the permission to use your voice,

words, and image in a project temporar-ily cal1ed "Untided Carp" anywhere onearth or in the universe in perpetuity.

Tall cottonwoods, ash trees, and ma-ples shaded the shore, which was ruttedblack muci firmed up in places withheaps of new sand. Crushed blue-and-white Busch beer cans disappeared intothe mud, crinkling underfoot. Alumi-num johnboats, some camo, some not,lined the riverfront in fleets. Fishing cos-tumes involved headgear: Army hel-mets, football helmets with face guardsor antlers or bufi-alo horns, octopus-tentacle hats, pirate bandannas, Vikinghelmets with horns and fur, devil hatswith upward-pointing horns, a hat likea giant red-and-white fishing bobber,a Burger King crornn. Competitors hadtheir faces painted camo colors or goldor red or zebra-striped. Bath, Illinois,was first surveyed by Abraham Lincoln,and on August 16, 1858, while cam-paigning against Stephen Douglas in therace for the U.S. Senate, Lincoln deliv-ered his famous "House DMded'speechto a large crowd in Bath. He took as histext the New Testament verse 'A housedivided against itself cannot stand." Ahundred and fifty-two years later, theConfederate-flag halter tops minglingwith the American ilags among thetournament crowd would have pvzzledhim; likewise, the pirate flags.

The competition took place in heatsthat lasted two hours. Before each start,boats put ofr from shore with their en-gines idling and waited for Betty De-Ford, of the Boat Tavern, to give thesignal. This honor belonged to her as theinventor and organizer ofthe tourna-ment. At the air-horn blast, the boatsraced ofl net-men and women holdingextra-large dip nets at the ready. Soonyou could see people plucking fish out ofthe air. Most of the boats then careeredaway and out of sight. Two hours later,they eased back to the riverbank, manyof them heavily loaded. Grinning com-petitors carried big, hear,y-duty plasticbarrels of silver carp, a man on each side,to the counting station, where festivalo{ficials counted the fish one by one andthrew them into the tarpauLin-lined bed

70 THE NEV YORKER, OCTOBER 25,2OIO

AT THE MANHATTAN JOCIAL JECURITY OFFICE

The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it.

-Miguel de Unamuno.

I'm practicing the stoic art of insouciance,not because I prefer not thinking aboutwhat signing up for Medicare means,or why so many who came after me are beingcalled first, but because downstairsmy soul was examined for signs ofviolenceand duplicity. Its fatigue and ambivalencewererit visible, apparently. In the next rowa man is teliing a girl bobbing to an iPhoneto sit still before the guard returns.When I was her age signing up meant goingto Vietnam, which meant practicingtheZen art ofvanishing. At the windowsa blind man is askingwhyhe didnt receivehis disability payments in prison,he needs his "... sustenance." Behind me,another man is asking to see my paper,

of a pickup truck. Among participantsand onlookers, a cheerful giddiness pre-vailed. I had never seen so many fish. Itwas like an old-time dream of frontierbounty.

Randy Stockham, of Havana, wonfirstprizr, fourteen hundred dollars. Heand his team caught a hundred andeighty-eight fish. Second prize of elevenhundred dollars went to Ron St. Ger-main, ofMichigan, with a hundred andeighty-slr. Mike Mamer and his SushiSlayers, of Washington, Illinois, werethird, at a hundred and fifg'-three fish(eight hundred dollars). Top prizes forcostumes were awarded to devils fromGreenview, Illinois, and cavemen fromMichigan. The toumament also donatedfifteen hundred dollars to help localchil-dren suffering from developmental dis-orders and cancer. A total of 3,239 fishwere caught, all ofthem silver ca1p. Theyended up as fertilizer on Betry DeFordsthirty-acre farm.

"I'm just a grandmother and a bar-tender," Betty DeFord said when I calledher at the Boat Tavem a week later for a

final recap. "I don't even own this bar. Istarted the Redneck Fishing Tourna-ment because I want to warn other partsofthe country aboutwhat these carp willdo. I remember when this water had noAsian carp, and you could go frog gig-

ging with a flashlight and a trollingmotor on a summer night. The way thesefish attack, that's impossible now. Wejust finished our tournament, and thecarp are jumping more out there thanthey ever were. I want everybody toknow: these fish need to be gone."

I s you proceed northward roward

-flChicago on rhe lllinois, rhe indus-trial noise along its banks increases.Turning into the Des Plaines Riversouth ofJoliet, you might feel you're inthe clanking, racketing final ascent ofarol1er coastels highest hill. After Joliet,the machinery ofgreater Chicago multi-plies alongthe riverbankuntil, inthe mu-nicipality of Romeoville, white refinerytowers in ranks sendwhite clouds spiral-ling slqward , and a mesa of coal like a

geological feature stretches for a third ofa mile, and empty semi-tlucfts make hol-low, drumlike sounds as they cross rail-road tracks, and other vehicles beep,backing up. The place is a no man's land.Here the channellized Des Plaines andthe Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal,which have alreadymetup some miles tothe south, run parallel, about three hun-dred yards apart. The water in both ofthem is the color of old lead.

Romeoville is where the Army Corpsof Engineers and the state of Illinois

think they can stop the carp. At two 1o-

cations on the Ship Canal, electric bar-riers zap the water. The canal, a rectilin-ear rock-wall ditch a hundred and sixtyfeet wide and about twenty-five feetdeep, passes through Romeoville be-hind chain-link fences topped withbarbedwire and hungwith signs: "Dan-ger: Electric Fish Barriel' and "ElectricCharge in Water/ Do Not Stop, An-chor, or Fish" and "Caution: This wateris not suitable for wading, swimming,jet skiing, water skiing/tubing, or anybody contact." At the fish barriers, steel

cables orbars on the bottom ofthe canalpulse low-voltage direct current. Theelectric charge-according to the Nary,whose divers tested it, somehow-isstrong enough, under some circum-stances, to cause muscle paralysis, i.n-ability to breathe, and ventricular fibril-lation in human beings.

\A4rat it does to fish is less clear. En-tering Chicago, the plucly Asian carpswims into a whole ciq'flrl of complica-tions, and it continues to swim single-mindedly while questions of politics,bureaucracy, urban hydrolory, arrd inter-state commerce work themselves out. Toput it anotherway: Chicago is a swamp.Various watercourses, only temporarilysubdued, thread throughout the metroarea. The engineers who caused local riv-

-Philip Schula

ers to run backvard a hundred years agoso as to send Chicago sewage south tothe Mississippi rather than into the citysfront yard-Lake Michigan-did nothave too hard ajob, because the under-lying swamp could do the same thing it-seHwhen in flood. Given enough rain-fall, the waters of swampy Chicagobecome one. The Des Plaines Riverneeds no electric barrier because its Chi-cago section does not connect to thelake; however, when the Des Plainesfloods it sloshes into the Ship Canal atpoints above the canals electric barriers.And the Des Plaines is very likely to have

Asian ca1p.

Meditating on the complications ofthe carp's presence in Chicago can dis-able the brain. Do the electric barriersactually stop all the carp, or are the lit-de ones able to get through? Do stunnedfish sometimes wash through in the oc-casional reverses offlow in the canal?Does the electric charge remain strongand uniform when ships and barges goby? (Probably; instruments in toll-booth-like buildings beside the canaladjust the charge when necessary.)Does the electric field have weak spotswhere fish can pass? Does a winter-time influx of road salt in the watercause the charge to fluctuate? Whatabout when the current must be turned

he's looking forwork, he says. Huppyto be free of "Afghanistan: What CouldWork""I hand him my NettYork Reztiezu of Books.

Bismarck said explaining was a weakness.As her father explains the necessityof securing her future, the girl squirms.She fears onlyboredom. I feared eve{,thing.In five months my father would dieand mother and I would live on the $200 a monthhis Social Securitypaid. At the windowsthe blind man is practicing the existential artof grovelling, exposing the stitches on his scalpto a clerkwho's practicing the qnical artofindifference. The girfs soul, hovering nearthe ceiling, is enjoying its moment ofradiance.My soul, fretfirlly pacing the water cooler,is practicing the fatalistic art ofunderstandingthat nothing can be done about Afghanistan,that in order to influence the future we must kill it.

off for maintenance of the bars or ca-bles? Is the rotenone chemical fish killeradministered when the current is offeffective without fail?

The Chicago waterw^y system hasseveral locks-why not simply closethese and be done with it? Would clos-ing the locks have a negligible effecton the economy of Illinois, as a studycommissioned by the state of Michiganhas claimed, or damage its economy ir-reparably, as demonstrated in a studypreferred by Illinois? Would closingthe locks risk flooding thousands ofChicago basements, as local officials say?

How about the part of the waterwaywhere there is no lock at all? Wouldn tthe carp simply go that way? Wiil thenew thir-teen-mile barricade of concreteand special wire mesh designed to keepcarp from swerving out of the DesPlaines and into the Ship Canal duringflood times actually work? Will unin-formed anglers introduce Asian-carpminnows while using them forbait? Andwhat about immigrant communitiesfrom Asiawho are knou'n to perform rit-ua1 releases of fish and other animalsduring certain religious ceremonies?Might they have performed such ritualsinvolving Asian ca{p already? Might theydo so in the future? Will all this bringprevention to naught?

The Illinois Department of NaturalResources addresses itself to many ofthese questions, as does the U.S. ArmyCorps of Engineers (Great Lakes andOhio River Division), the MetropolitanWater Reclamation District of GreaterChicago, the U.S. Fish and WildlifeService, the Senate Great Lakes TaskForce, the Congressional Great LakesTask Force, the White House Councilon Environmental Qralify, the inter-agency Asian Carp Rapid ResponseTeam, and the interagency Asian CarpRegional Coordinating Committee'sAsian Carp Control Framework. TheIllinois Chamber of Commerce, theAmerican Water-ways Operators, andthe Chemical Industry Council of ll1i-nois put in a word for industry while theNatural Resources Defense Council,Freshwater tr'uture, the Sierra Club,Healing Our Waters Great Lakes Co-alition, and the Alliance for the GreatLakes offer perspective from the envi-ronmental side. The Chicago Depart-ment of the Environment, the Great

THE NEV YORKER. OCTOBER 25.2OIO 7I

piece of legislation he called the CARpACT, for Close All Routes and PreventAsian Carp Today.

Senator Dick Durbin, of Illinois, an-nounced that he had asked the Presidentto appoint a Coordinated ResponseCommander for Asian Carp, and thePresident had agreed. This so-called"carp czil'was to be chosenwithin thirydays. The President made clear that hehad a"zero tolerance" poliry for invasivespecies. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, ofNew York, announced her support foranother anti-carp bil1, the PermanentPrevention of Asian Carp Act. Michi-gans Mike Cox accused Obama of notdoing enough about the problem because

he sympathized with his own state ofIliinois. (Cox, a Republican, is runningfor govemor.) Senator Carl Levin, Dem-ocrat of Michigan, sent Obama a letterasking him to act quickly to protect theGreat Lakes from Asian carp, and thirty-two representatives and fouteen senators

added their names.

T Tnljke Romeoville, the place whereL,/ the apocalyptic bighead was caught

is quiet. To some, it might even be par-adise. The part of Lake Calumet inwhich the commercial fisherman nettedthis carp doubles as the water h azardbe-side the concluding holes of a ltrrury golfcourse called Harborside, ratedby Gofueek as the third-best municipal golfcourse in the country. One afternoon, Iwalked some ofthe course. To playeigh-teen at Harborside on a Saturday or a

Sunday costs ninety-five dollarsl newS.U.V.s filled the parking lot. Several ofthe raised tees provided a panoramicview of the Chicago skyline, while thesurrounding Rust Belt ruins and ghettoneighborhoods of south Chicago just be-yond the fence seemed far away.I askedemployees at the clubhouse golf shop,waiters in the restaut^nt

^ bartender,

and a man tending the greens, but nonehad heard ofthe nation-shaking carpnetted here two months before.

The reason the fisherman happened

Lakes Fishery Commission, the GreatLakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative,and the University of Toledo's LakeErie Center are heard from as well. Forlegal guidance, concerned parties refer tothe Nonindigenous Aquatic NuisancePrevention and ControlAct of 1990 (re-

vised as the National Invasive SpeciesAct of 7996, revised as the NationalAquatic Invasive Species Act of 2007);also, to the Asian Carp Prevention andControlAct of 2006.

Man proposes, carp disposes.Through waving weedbeds of bureau-cracy and human cross-purposes, thefish swims. Starting in2009, tests forAsian-carp DNA in Chicago waters in-dicated that the fish might have movedbeyond the barriers. In February of2010, the state of Illinois, hoping tocalm its neighbors, began an intensiveprogram of fishing for actual fish withelectroshocking and nets, while theDNA tests continued. These eflortsturned up more DNA but no fish. InMarch, the Illinois D.N.R. announcedthat slx weeks of searching had foundno Asian carp throughoutthe entire Chi-cago Area Waterway System. Then, on

June 22nd, a commercial fisherman work-ing for the D.N.R. netted a nineteen-pound-six-ounce bighead carp in LakeCalumet, thi4y miles beyond the electricbarrier and six miles from Lake Michi-gan. Between this well-fed, healthy maleAsian carp and the Great Lakes no ob-stacle intervened.

If the neighbors had been worriedbefore, they began to sweat and hyper-ventilate now. Outcries of alarm camefrom officialdom in Minnesota, Wis-consin, Michigan, Ohio, PennsyTvania,and NewYork, as well as from Canada.Michigan s attorney general, Mike Cox,brought suit in federal district court toforce the Corys ofEngineers and the cityof Chicago to close the locks immedi-ately. Four other Great Lakes states, butnot New York, joined on Michigan'sside; two previous lawsuits for the samepu{pose had already failed. The SenateEnergy and Natural Resources Subcom-mittee on Water and Power held hear-ings on the federal response to Asiancaqp. The govemor and the attomeygen-eral of Ohio called on the President toconvene a White House Asian CarpEmergenrySummit. Dave Camp, acon-gressman from Michigan, proposed a

72 THE NEV YORKER, OCTODER 25.2OIO

to be fishing there in the first place wasthat a team of scientists from NotreDame had already found bighead carpDNA in the water. Working for theCorps oftrngineers, the universitys Cen-ter for Aquatic Conselation has beendoing DNA tests for more than a year.As part ofthe increased tracking ofAsianca1p, the Notre Dame scientists collectedsamples from bodies of water all overChicago. David M. Lodge, a professor ofbiolory, heads the center. I stopped bySouth Bend to see him on my way backfrom lllinois.

Professor Lodge is a tall and genialman in his fifties, with a Southern accent,blue eyes, and a D.Phil . in znology fromOfordUniversity, which he attended ona Rhodes. He wore a yellow tennis shirtwith his bailpoint pen and mechanicalpencil stuck neady in the button part ofthe neck, an innovation I admired, be-cause I was wearing the same kind ofshirt and had compensated for its lack ofbreast pocket by putting my pens in mypants pockets, always an awls,vard deal.He asked if I was writing somethingfunny on carp. I said I probably was. "Iknow you can't not laugh when you see

the silver carp jumping all over the place,but it's really not funny," he said. "It's atragic thing, and people are wrong totriviahze it. We should focus on thesefislis potential environmental and eco-nomic impact. In the Great Lakes-justas we're seeing now in south Louisiana-the environment is the economy. Lookhow the degrading of Lake Erie in thesixties and seventies contributed to thedecline of Detroit and Cleveland andBu1lhlo. To people who say this is a ques-tion ofjobs versus the environment, I say

ids not either-or.'The bigger issue is howwe as a coun-

try protect ourselves against invasivespecies. At the moment, we are notverygood at preventing invasions. We'reconstantly reacting after it's too late.Most invasions, if detected early, can be

stopped, because establishing an organ-ism so iis viable in a new environmentis not automatic. Our current approachis more or less open-door. Right now,the canal-and-river passage across Illi-nois from the lake to the Mississippi is a

highway for the dispersal of organisms.The Great Lakes is a hot spot for aquaticinvasions. In the lakes there are a hun-&ed and six species non-native to North

America that arc not in the Mississippi,while there are only fifty in the Missis-sippi that are not in the Great Lakes. Aneven greater threat, really, is ofinvasionsgoing in the opposite direction from thecarp's-that is, going from the lakes tothe Mississippi. The Mississippi system

holds the richest heritage of biodiversityin North America. The electric barrier at

Romeoville was built originally to stop a

small invasive fish called the round gobyfrom coming south-too late, as it tumedout, because today the round gobies are

established in the Illinois. A later inva-sive, the tubenose goby, does appear tohave been stopped. So the barrier mayhave helped. But over time it will not be

able to stop every4hing.

"As for the Asian carp and t}re lakes,

worst case is they're dready establishedthere. We wouldnt necessarily know.Usually, the fust signwe have that organ-isms are invading is that members of thepublic see them. Butpeople areritunder-water, and netting and electroshockingare not good tools for finding out what's

going on in a body of water, especiallynot in one as big as Lake Michigan."

To explain more about how DNAtesting for Asian carp works, DavidLodge led me to the office of his col-league Christopher Jerde, a brown-haired South Dakotan who helped de-velop the technique. I did not follow allthe science of it. Essentially, the tech-nique uses DNA found inwater samples

to determine what species might havebeen present, just as DNA evidencecan suggest that a person was at a crimescene. The DNA sequences in watersamples are not followed to the pointwhere individual fish are singled out,but that could be done, too. Christopher

Jerde said that people who wanted toignore the carp problem kept pooh-poohing Notre Dame's DNA findingsbefore the confirming bighead ca{p was

caught. Theyargued that the DNA couldhave been carried in on a duclis feathers,

or something. But in places where histeam got multiple positive hits he knewthe fish had to be there. When he wasproved right, he took no pleasure. Thecarp invasion only makes him mourn.

Some planners who take a long viewbelieve that the Midwest's invasive-spe-cies problem requires abold solution: thecomplete separation, or re-separation, ofthe Great Lakes from the Mississippi at

"Hott; Iong ba,ue you been ttith 0urj6rm, Dad?"

Chicago. This huge infrastructure proj-ectwouid consist of concrete dikes, newshipping terminals, new water-treatmentfacilities, maybe barge lifts to transferfreight, maybe the re-reversing ofChica-gds wastewater flow so that it no longergoes south. Business interests tend tohate this idea. I askedJerde about it, andhe said, "Right here is where you couldput something like that," and called up aGoogle Earth photo of Chicago's SouthSide on his computer. "This empty area

here is a Rust Belt nowhere left over fromold Chicago," he said.'The main hub ofa new shipping and hydrological ar-rangement for Chicago could go righthere." As it happened, the brown andemptyregion he indicated on the satellite

photo was not far from the green oases ofthe Harborside goJf course.

'1Me11, we dorit have opinions on pol-iry," he continued. 'lMe just provide thedata. We give it to the Corps or theD.N.R., and they present it to the peoplewho make the decisions, and it's out ofour hands. \A4ren people were comingup with all those supposed rebuttals toour findings, we couldn't defend our-selves. It's frustrating. People either say

we're wrong or exaggerating, so there's

no problem and there's nothing we need

to do, or else theyturn a-round and sayit'stoo late, the carp are already here, so

therds nothing we can do. I dont knowwhetherwe can stop these fish, but ifwedo nothing I can guarantee this problemand plenty of others will get worse.

"Now, let me just show you a fewof the places where we've had positiveDNA hits for Asian carp." He toucheda button on his computer and litde yel-low thumbtack-like circles appearedon the Google Earth photo. They fol-lowed the Ship Canal, they appeared inthe Grand Calumet and Litde CalumetRivers, they clustered at the south end ofthe Romeoville electric barrier-proofthat it was stopping fish, he said. "Lastsummer, we had a positive hit here, inCalumet Harbor, which is separatedfrom the lake only by a breakwater," he

said. Then he moved in to a closer viewof Chicagos downtown. 'lMe also got apositive right here." He pointed to ayel-low thumbtack at the Chicago RiverLock and Dam, under Lake ShoreDrive, about a mile and a half north ofthe Shedd Aquarium. tTHE NEV YORKER, OCTOBER 25,2OIO 73