We have all seen the videos of these jumping carp fleeing boats - an obvious evolutionary predation evasion.
At the rate they are spreading this is a losing race - unless a specific toxin/predator can be found that will kill only these carp.
It seems to me that a mechanical carp harvester that has flat extended flats on each side that are covered by a moving rubber mat like a supermarket checkout line that brings whatever leaps on moves to the boat and is dumped into a holding tank. They would ne to be adjusted for width in case of rivers. A float at the ends will prevent a huge load from pulling one side down.
Such a harvester could go back and forth across lakes/rivers/shores to mechanically harvest these carp. They can be used for catfood, fertilizer etc.
Carp are prolific egg layers, so this would need to be done prior to the spawning time and repeated again and again as the carp are killed and new ones grow - at some point you would be able to exploit this leaping reflex to the disadvantage of the carp. EDIT giantg2 commented that this could lead to an evolutionary fork to non jumping fish = true, but along with other elimination processes in parallel it would take time to select - enough time??
As the article says, Carp is tricky eating because of the bones. If you are feeding kids you have to give them a tiny pinch at a time. If you are feeding yourself you can spit the bones out. If I am really hungry I just eat the bones. Taste is fine, not much different then any other whitefish.
I had a Chinese girlfriend in high school and her grandma made us Carp soup. This was the first time I ate carp. If you are really good with chopsticks you can pick out the bones but I had to use my fingers which amused grandma. The soup tasted fine but she used the head of the fish as decoration so the fish was looking at me as I ate him. Nowadays I burry the fish heads in the garden as they are good fertilizer.
The simple solution is to fill the canal in with rocks and soil. It ought never to have been dug, because the economic interests of Illinois should not be allowed to threaten Michigan’s environment.
Does anyone find it ridiculous to try to target an market based solution to the problem through intentionally overfishing a species to extinction? Is that how we believe fishing markets work?
If you really want to eliminate the species, you don’t need people to find them palatable. You just need to pay per carp. Look at what was nefariously done to the bison, with the famous photos of the stacked bison skulls. We didn’t need to first build a marketing campaign to sell bison burgers, it was simply cash for kills. You could of course put the carp into dog food fish sticks or whatever, but it sounds like this is an emergency and not something that can wait for diets to adapt.
Bison take much longer to have a calf (9.5 months + 7-8 months of nursing) and typically only have one calf per go around. Carp, on the other hand, produce about two million eggs per year. It's much easier to depopulate bison than invasive carp.
haha, they could indeed happen, but if they are as pervasive as publicized wouldn’t it take a while to get to the point where it makes more sense to breed them instead of just catching them in the wild?
maybe it’s best to just give someone the job and pay them a salary? I still don’t like relying on people getting an appetite for copi as the solution.
I sadly forgot where I read about it (maybe "Under a White Sky" by Elizabeth Kolbert) but the States do already pay people to mass-cull these Asian carp by the literal ton (found https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/7362/827782934 specifically about this point). It's crazy what extremes governments are going to try to contain these fish - to include generating an electric field in rivers that selectively kills fish over a certain size (i.e. Asian carp).
in 1947 in the UK, there was a £10 (10 pound) bounty to incent people to examine field potatoes in detail for the beetle and their caterpillars. £10 was 3-4 weeks wages then.
Soon beetle breeders emerged and by mid summer the bounty was abolished - the new DDT was used.
It's universal. And it's a great time saver. When an article is questioning you, it's urging you to read some drivel to program you to think in a certain way.
There is no better way to avoid PR disguised as journalism than by answering the headline with NO and closing the tab / not clicking / throwing the magazine or paper into the trash and unsubscribing.
