Asian Carp 1.jpg

Get ready. The silver carp are comin'.

(The Plain Dealer)

Unlike the foot-dragging U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources champions an aggressive, proactive strategy to protect Lake Erie from a silver and bighead carp invasion.

Good for ODNR.

Its latest reconnaissance mission along the Muskingum River was triggered by water samples last fall that contained traces of carp environmental DNA, or eDNA.

Luckily, the ODNR Division of Wildlife and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service didn't find any live carp after deploying electrofishing crews to 125 sites along the Muskingum and portions of the Tuscarawas and Walhonding rivers in June.

Silver carp have a proclivity to rocket out of the water at the sound of a motorboat. Add a jolt of electricity and they should explode into the air like a carp-nado.

But nary a silver nor bighead carp was sighted.

Which doesn't mean they aren't there. They are in the Ohio, the Miami and the Little Miami rivers.

"It's not surprising that they might be in the Muskingum," said Rich Carter, ODNR executive administrator of fish management. "But if they are present, it's in very low abundance."

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But unlike the do-nothing Army Corps and the dithering 7

th

U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ODNR is determined to do something. The federal appeals court's chief judge famously noted in a recent ruling that "we do not want to be understood as taking this problem lightly," just before she torpedoed a lawsuit brought by Ohio and four other Great Lakes states to prevent these voracious invaders from getting into the Great Lakes at Chicago from

the already-invaded

Mississippi River system.

To prevent the carpocalypse of Lake Erie, the shallowest and most vulnerable of the Great Lakes, ODNR has taken the lead on the hydrological separation of the Ohio River watershed – which includes the Muskingum River – on one side and the Lake Erie watershed on the other.

It is the best way to assure the continued well-being of these 10,000-year-old liquid assets that supply drinking water to 26 million people and support a multibillion-dollar tourism and commercial fishing industry.

ODNR gets it. Time for the Corps and the courts to get onboard.