The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan

Author:Dan Egan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

THE DNA EVIDENCE THAT ASIAN CARP ARE SWIMMING IN LAKE Michigan has mounted in recent years. It turned up some 200 miles north of Chicago in the waters of Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula in 2013. It turned up in 2014 in an inland river in the state of Michigan, one that flows into Lake Michigan. It also turned up in late 2014 in the Chicago River just about a block from the lakeshore. But these microscopic flecks, this genetic “smoke,” is all that researchers have found since the one and only Asian carp was plucked from waters above the barrier in 2010. The lack of fish flesh does not matter to Lodge’s colleague Chadderton, who has likened the genetic evidence to that of a murder scene.

“If it was a single fingerprint on the murder weapon and in the house where the crime occurred, you might ask the question: Well, maybe not? But the reality is, we’ve got fingerprints all over the crime scene,” said Chadderton. “They’re on the body. They’re on the knife. . . . They’re smeared all over the place and they’re on the handle of the door into the house. It’s just like, come on people . . . the reality is the body of the evidence says we’re dealing with live fish!”

Yet for now, the electric barrier is the only defense between the Asian carp–infested Mississippi basin and the Lake Michigan shoreline, and this should make no one feel comfortable. In early 2014, I obtained from the Fish and Wildlife Service a video taken by an underwater camera at the barrier several months earlier. Just one three-­minute clip revealed dozens of little fish swimming upstream through the swath of electrified water. Lab tests conducted on a scale model said this was not possible with the voltage the barrier is operating at, but nobody before had ever bothered to drop a sonar-like camera in the water to see what might actually be in the canal.

The Army Corps brass remain nonplussed.

“Those aren’t carp,” Peabody’s replacement, Brigadier General Margaret Burcham, told me in early 2014 in a conference room overlooking the downtown Chicago River—the very stretch of river that the migrating carp would pass through on their way into Lake Michigan, a mile upstream. Burcham isn’t a fish expert; she has a graduate degree in computer science. Actual fishery experts weren’t nearly as confident in what Burcham claimed to see—or, more specifically, claimed to not see.

“You can identify that they are fish. You can identify that they’re moving—you can see that,” Aaron Woldt, Fish and Wildlife’s deputy assistant regional director for fisheries, told me. “But you can’t tell [which] species.”

The day an Army Corps general becomes convinced that an Asian carp invasion of the Great Lakes is under way—the day the fish regularly start turning up in nets above the electric barrier—is also a day it will probably be too late to do anything about it.

A tiny private fish pond in Missouri offers a distressing glimpse of what might be in store for the Great Lakes.

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