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Overview
Politicians, ecologists, and government wildlife officials are fighting a desperate rearguard action to halt the onward reach of Asian Carp, four troublesome fish now within a handful of miles from entering Lake Michigan. From aquaculture farms in Arkansas to the bayous of Louisiana; from marshlands in Indiana to labs in Minnesota; and from the Illinois River to the streets of Chicago where the last line of defense has been laid to keep Asian carp from reaching the Great Lakes, Overrun takes us on a firsthand journey into the heart of a crisis. Along the way, environmental journalist Andrew Reeves discovers that saving the Great Lakes is only half the challenge. The other is a radical scientific and political shift to rethink how we can bring back our degraded and ignored rivers and waterways and reconsider how we create equilibrium in a shrinking world.
With writing that is both urgent and wildly entertaining, Andrew Reeves traces the carp’s explosive spread throughout North America from an unknown import meant to tackle invasive water weeds to a continental scourge that bulldozes through everything in its path.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770414761 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 03/12/2019 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 1,072,971 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
In the Beginning
Little rock, AR — The man is grainy in the black-and-white photograph, standing on a clapboard dock, his back hardwood straight. There's a pile of debris where squat, wooden paddles form a makeshift step to a wobbly pier where a rickety wooden chair rests. Discarded boards are laid in the swamp beside an ancient dinghy, a boat launch of sorts. He stands in white shirtsleeves and loose trousers, in contrast with his dark tie and hat, hands on hips angled towards the camera. Another man, his face blurred in motion, looks out over the trees half rotted from rooting in standing water. It is 1955. It is the beginning.
James Miller Malone Sr., a judge in Lonoke County in the northeast corner of Arkansas, had bought this $200 parcel of land two years before. Using equipment he acquired in a side business buying and selling heavy machinery, Malone Sr.'s ambition, when he wasn't running for governor of Arkansas, as he did in 1946, was to build a lake where people paid to fish. Responsibility for the project would ultimately fall to James Miller Malone Jr., the judge's boy, born in a Little Rock hospital on September 30, 1926, to Adele Willson Malone. In photographs, the younger Malone is identifiable by his wide, genuine smile half-concealed by an imposing dark mustache that grayed as he aged. An intensely curious man, Jim Malone, as he was called, had driving passions for politics and writing. After finishing high school in 1944, he joined the navy and served two years on an auxiliary repair ship before being set loose in Millington, Tennessee, with the war's end. Like millions of other young men home from war, Malone Jr. used the G1 Bill to attend the University of Arkansas in 1947, graduating two years later with a Bachelor of Science. Following his father's interests, he drifted into politics, stumping for Governor Sidney McMath in 1950 before speechwriting for Arkansas governor Orval Faubus from 1954 to 1956.
After constructing his father's fee fishing lake in the years after 1955, the younger Malone turned to rice production, borrowing money to sink two wells that helped him forge 160 acres of rice beds on his land. When a Washington decree on rice acreage shrunk his fields from 160 acres to 51, Malone protected his investment by raising golden shiner minnows on 25 acres as bait fish for Arkansas's fledgling fish-farming industry. It was that or risk losing everything.
He didn't know it then, but Malone's desperate shift from rice production to fish rearing reshaped the direction of both his life and North America's ecological landscape.
Entrepreneur, savior, environmentalist, despoiler, short-sighted capitalist: Malone's attempts to exploit the potential he saw in Asian carp, grass carp especially, would see him labeled with all these monikers and more. He foresaw a time when grass carp would keep unimaginable quantities of chemical herbicides out of the environment while taxpayers saved millions of dollars on pesticides bought to control aquatic weeds. By 1974, Malone himself was spending $18,000 each year (over $92,000 today) to control unwanted aquatic vegetation on his farm alone; his neighbor, fellow commercial fish producer Leon Hill, spent $20,000 annually on chemical controls. Malone became grass carp's staunchest defender when public opinion turned against them, a protective role he dutifully maintained despite the eventual opposition of biologists, the federal government, sport fishers and the media. His involvement with all Asian carps took Malone before Congress to testify on the importance of maintaining a sterile grass carp certification program, while his research on fish genetics ushered him to the forefront of that growing movement, all of which elevated his stature in an expanding aquaculture world.
I witnessed the global extent of his influence in the pages of his office guest book. Hundreds of entries from dozens of countries were recorded in the ledger between 1975 and 2001, names written in reds, blacks and blues, from perfect mid-century cursive to choppy block letters printed in an unsteady hand that reminded me of my late grandfather's penmanship. For decades, Malone worked on grass carp spawning with a veritable fisheries League of Nations, and his guest book reflects this: Nigeria, Colombia, New Zealand, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Egypt, Bangladesh, West Germany, Pakistan. Visitors from around the world came to Arkansas to meet the man who spoke grass carp.
But naysayers in his own backyard saw those same fish as an ecological menace worthy of science fiction. Relentlessly harangued for his work, Malone waged a near-constant battle, spending decades rebutting critics, combating those who feared the effects grass carp and their larger cousins, the silvers and the bigheads, were having on aquatic ecosystems. Despite the opposition, he built a family business around grass carp and its weed-eating abilities regardless of the potential for ecological destruction many biologists believed the fish posed. In the early days of their importation and breeding, Malone convinced states to employ grass carp in place of chemical poisons to remove aquatic weeds while establishing the "World's Largest Hatchery of Chinese Fish." In doing so, he unwittingly facilitated their spread throughout America, in addition to playing a leading role in transporting silver and bighead carp to Arkansas, the two species currently tearing across vast swaths of America. Intently focused on the potential of sterile grass carp to rid America of pesky weeds, Malone never accepted the blame.
At the behest of his longtime friend Jim Johnson, a segregationist Arkansas Supreme Court justice, Malone donated a lifetime's worth of papers, correspondence, transactions and press clippings to the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) near the turn of the century. His collection spans more than a dozen boxes of material, the daily bric-a-brac of a man who, unexpectedly, found himself at the center of an ongoing controversy he didn't live to see the end of. One spring day I called UCA archival director Jimmy Bryant to ask about Malone's papers. "I knew what collection you was after the moment I heard where you're from," Bryant told me; there wasn't much else a Toronto writer would want from his stockpile. I booked a flight.
* * *
August 1963. Shao-Wen Ling, a Malaysian fisheries biologist with the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, was received as a special guest of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) at their Fish Farming Experimental Station in Stuttgart, a small town in Arkansas's Mississippi River delta. The state was overrun with aquatic vegetation, consuming waterways that counties, municipal governments and private industry needed clear. Four years earlier, Ling had suggested grass carp could eat up America's nuisance aquatic weeds. Now, surrounded by officials from USFWS, Auburn University and the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (AGFC), Ling counseled his American colleagues to strike a deal with Malaysia to ship grass carp fry to Arkansas. The U.S. officials in attendance had heard of grass carp's insatiable appetite, but few beyond Auburn University's Homer Swingle, who had been singing grass carp's biological control praise since 1957, had any notable firsthand experience with the fish.
The August meeting concluded with a promise to import grass carp fry for an in-lab study, leaving the USFWS to work out the logistics with Malaysian authorities. Despite the fact that it was his recommendation, Ling added a cautionary note. "The unforeseen danger of careless introduction of exotic species could be tremendous," he warned. Grass carp "should be able to adapt to American waters well. But the possibility of having it become another major problem fish like the common carp is so great that unless the fish can become acceptable ... its introduction should not be done hastily."
The Americans didn't deliberate long. On November 16, 1963, less than a week before President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, 70 fingerling grass carp weighing less than a nickel each arrived in Stuttgart, bound for four lab aquaria and a tenth-acre pond. Less than six months later, Auburn University's Agricultural Experiment Station received a dozen grass carp from Taiwan. Initially, Auburn researchers kept the fish in plastic-lined pools topped with netting to prevent the carp from leaping out and suffocating on the laboratory floor. It was at Auburn that the first recorded instance of an American being struck by a leaping Asian carp occurred when a grass carp jumped a seine net and knocked the son of Homer Swingle, future head of Auburn's Department of Fisheries and Allied Aquacultures, to the ground.
Learning to spawn grass carp in-hatchery was the first challenge American researchers faced. Yet the artificial reproduction moved at breakneck speed. The first grass carp produced in America were bred on May 19, 1966, when Fish and Wildlife Service agents spawned 8,000 fry shared 50/50 between the Stuttgart facility and the nearby Joe Hogan State Fish Hatchery, run by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Not to be outdone, Auburn spawned 1,400 fry weeks later and a whopping 100,300 fish by 1968. Astonishingly, so lax were the rules regulating exotic species that two-thirds of the one hundred thousand-plus Auburn fry were given to "various persons" operating beyond university control. The interstate brinksmanship continued when the AGFC teamed up with Fish and Wildlife staff to produce 3.1 million grass carp at Stuttgart in 1972.
There was now no question that U.S. biologists had mastered the art of spawning grass carp. In fact, by the late 1960s, Swingle ordered one of his Auburn graduate students, James Avault, to fry up all the grass carp the university had received in their 1964 shipment as a sort of taste test. "Go ahead and cook them," Swingle told Avault. "I've got more coming." Research continued into their effectiveness at eating invasive weeds as word spread of the grass carp's inextinguishable appetite. Scientists found themselves unable to temper expectations among state and private-sector resource managers or to resist the pressure from government bodies desperate for solutions to their aquatic weed problems. By the time Arkansas reared over three million fry, grass carp had been legally couriered from private hatcheries to 16 states, doubling to 32 by 1977. Fertile grass carp swam freely from California to New Hampshire, Oregon to Florida. Twelve years after the first spawn in 1966, Americans transported grass carp 1,100 miles south, 2,000 miles west and 2,800 miles northeast from Stuttgart, making grass carp one of the fastest spreading exotic species in U.S. history.
The United States wasn't alone in falling for Asian carp. Once commodified, the fish was traded among Eastern and Western nations for culturing as food and weed control. China, the world's single largest producer, spearheaded the global trade of Asian carp beginning in the 1960s. The origin of almost all carp species at the time could be traced to China in less than six degrees of separation, from all corners of the world. Follow the lineage: Peruvian officials received their grass carp from Israel, who were introduced to them from the West Germans, who got theirs from the Hungarians, who — along with the Brazilians, Soviets, Japanese and others — got their fish from China. Trading took place without Chinese involvement too: Mexico got carp from Cuba, Indonesia from Japan, England from Austria. After 1962, most nations were culturing Asian carp.
* * *
For a brief moment in the 1960s and early 1970s, America fell in love with grass carp. Their potential to rid irrigation canals, golf courses, public lakes and streams of choking aquatic weeds appeared boundless. They were an ecological solution as perfectly tailored to the decade's environmentalist fashion as bell-bottoms and silk cravats.
Optimism for grass carp's success became deeply rooted in reputable science once the first U.S. study emerged from Auburn University in October 1965. There was "little or no information about it in the United States since its recent introduction," said Auburn fisheries biologist James Avault. Gathering a dozen aquatic weeds known to choke Southern waterways, Avault spent 12 weeks watching how quickly grass carp consumed vegetation and what varieties they preferred. Filamentous algae were always the first to go, he reported, and while it would take longer, the more undesirable alligator weed and water hyacinth were eventually gobbled up too. "The grass carp appears to be one of the most promising fish species for biological control of aquatic weeds." He was particularly enthralled by their hardiness and cold-water tolerance.
Academic journals were swimming in papers from America, West Germany, Sweden, the Soviet Union and Romania suggesting native fishes grew faster and survived longer in water stocked with grass carp. Whole ecosystems benefited. "Freed from weed infestation, pond waters are better aerated, sunlit and warmed," wrote Barry Pierce, a biologist with the Sea Grant College Program at the University of Hawaii. With less space consumed by underwater weeds, habitable niches for surface-dwelling fishes increased, decluttering lake and river bottoms. Grass carp feces were also cited as food for bottom-feeders. Swedish researchers found that water stocked with grass carp often had more oxygen in it, resulting in heightened zooplankton and microfauna levels in Swedish lakes. And since their teeth evolved to eat only plant matter, grass carp didn't compete with native and game fish for food. So perfectly did grass carp squeeze into a vacant place in America's riverine ecology that their import felt miraculous.
Miraculous indeed. "No bird or plane, it's a white amur!" noted the National Observer, which ran a feature with cover art depicting a crudely drawn, human-sized grass carp donning Superman's crest and cape. "It's tastier than red snapper!" the Observer claimed. "It's trickier to catch than trout! And can hurl itself through the air farther than a tarpon!" These superfish, the article claimed, could clean up Lake Erie's algae problem, and, in time, become so prodigious at eating aquatic weeds that an elaborate "Rent-a-Fish" industry could spring up to ferry them around the nation, sewing clean water seeds like a Piscean Johnny Appleseed.
The Observer wasn't alone in praising grass carp, which many, including Malone, often called "white amur." "Amur are so big and they eat so much so fast, a person needing a pond cleaned out may have to rent himself a fish for a few days," said Charles Walker, an executive in Washington's sports fisheries bureau. The trade magazine American Farmer called grass carp "ecology's helper," claiming the fish "slurps in weeds like a hay baler takes in alfalfa." They may even surpass beef as a protein source in American diets, Mechanix Illustrated claimed.
The craze accelerated rapidly. Grass carp had been shipped to private companies in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Maryland and Texas by 1972; soon after, the fish were turning up in waters throughout the South and Gulf Coast. Tax dollars flowed by the barrel towards Asian carp research throughout America in the years between 1972 and 1985. The Department of Agriculture's Fish Farming Experimental Station in Stuttgart and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service led the charge. In a sign of things to come, by the mid-1970s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began holding meetings on the effectiveness of grass carp at weed control. The Corps shelled out $1.3 million in 1976 to study what influence five thousand-plus grass carp would have on aquatic vegetation in Florida's Lake Conway.
Before that change of heart began, universities and state agencies got in on the action. Memphis State in Tennessee (now the University of Memphis) investigated chromosomal mutations in grass carp, while Clemson in South Carolina experimented with carp control of phytoplankton. They joined Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Oregon State in the Pacific northwest and the University of Florida in Gainesville in studying the hot new thing in fisheries science. Shipments of grass (and later silver and bighead) carp headed to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD), the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), California irrigation districts and the South Carolina government. As late as 1983, Senators were applauding the TVA for its use of white amur for hydrilla control. One Senator even read a poem on the Senate floor: "Don't go near the water, friend / The grassy-carp is loose / Yesterday, it ate my dog / Today, it ate my goose." Silver carp would arrive in commercial ponds at the University of Hawaii on Oahu's north shore for algae control. And on the recommendation of the National Academy of Sciences, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission gifted 100,000 grass carp fry to Egypt in 1976 to clean coontail-infested irrigation canals; an AGFC research contingent was also deployed to Sudan to troubleshoot the African nation's faltering grass carp program.
The Bureau of Reclamation, meanwhile, funded silver carp stocking in Colorado into the Clinton administration.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Overrun"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Andrew Reeves.
Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
IntroductionChapter 1 - In the Beginning
Chapter 2 - 'Ecology's Helper'
Chapter 3 - Tragedy of the White Amur
Chapter 4 - Research Backwater
Chapter 5 - Scientific Salvation
Chapter 6 - Trouble with Fishing
Chapter 7 - 'Eat 'em to Beat 'em?'
Chapter 8 - The Glorious Gate
Chapter 9 - eDNA Rising
Chapter 10 - Via Chicago
Chapter 11 - At Home in the Great Lakes
Conclusion
PostScript