Live Asian carp found near Lake Michigan

A live Asian carp has been discovered in a Chicago waterway about 15 kilometres from Lake Michigan — well beyond an electric barrier network designed to prevent the invasive fish that have infested the Mississippi River system from reaching the Great Lakes, officials said Friday.

The silver carp was 70 centimetres long and weighed about 3.5 kilograms, officials with the Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee told The Associated Press. It was caught Thursday by a commercial fisherman under contract with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources about three kilometres below the T.J. O’Brien Lock and Dam in the Calumet River, on Chicago’s south side.

The location is the closest to the Great Lakes that a silver carp is known to have reached, said Charlie Wooley, Midwest deputy regional director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Silver carp are among four types of Asian carp threatening to invade the lakes, where scientists say they could compete with native species, unravel aquatic food chains and devastate the region’s $7 billion fishing industry.

Even so, officials cautioned that the discovery doesn’t mean Asian carp populations have become established in the network of rivers and canals between the barriers and the Great Lakes, or in the lakes themselves. It’s more likely that the carp was a loner that somehow made its way into the Chicago area, Wooley said.

“This is concerning but it’s not a three-alarm fire right now and we don’t expect it to be,” he said in an interview.

The fish carcass is being sent to Southern Illinois University, where biologists will attempt to determine where it came from, said Kevin Irons, the state agency’s aquatic nuisance program manager. Under a plan developed years ago by the multi-agency co-ordinating committee, the find triggers two weeks of “intense” net fishing in the area where the silver carp was caught to look for others.

This is the second time a live Asian carp has been found beyond the three electric barriers clustered in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal 60 kilometres downstream from Lake Michigan. The other was a bighead carp caught in Chicago’s Lake Calumet in 2010.

Bighead and silver carp are of concern because of their voracious appetites for plankton, tiny plants and animals on which nearly all fish depend.