When an Army Corps of Engineers general teamed with a Rhodes Scholar to fish forAsian carp DNA in the Chicago River, both hoped it might help win the battle to pro-tect the Great Lakes from yet another invader. Instead, they ended up in a federal courtfight over how much weight you can put in a mere molecule.

T he first hint that the river wasdying came when the fish startedto float to the surface, theirwhite bellies aglow in the liftingdawn light. One by one they

popped into view, the way stars emerge atdusk. Some could only flap their gills asthey drifted on the tea-colored current. Oth-ers thrashed. All of them — ultimately aconstellation of thousands — would be car-casses by the time the winter sun slippedbelow the horizon.

The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canallooked like a crime scene on this graymorning of Dec. 3, 2009. Yellow police tapelaced the banks. Roads to the water’s edgewere blocked by local police officers shiver-ing in the cold, unable to explain to passers-by exactly what had happened. Behind thebarricades, a generator thrummed outside

a huge command tent with computer workstations and coffee for the 400 federal, stateand Canadian fishery workers who had de-scended on the canal from across the GreatLakes region.

Just outside the tent, the bosses of the op-eration had corralled a cluster of news re-porters at the water’s edge to tell their sto-ry. They were the ones who were killing theriver, they explained. They had decided topoison it because they were at war — witha fish.

“I can sum up my comments in six words:It’s time to man the barricades,” JohnRogner of the Illinois Department of Natu-ral Resources said as President BarackObama’s handpicked Great Lakes czar,Cameron Davis, stood rigidly at his side.“For nearly 10 years we’ve watched as twospecies of introduced Asian carp — the big-

DEEP TROUBLE | A HIGH-TECH HUNT FOR ASIAN CARP

In a desperate effort to sniff out a stealthy invader, scientists are liftinggenetic fingerprints from Chicago waterways. Does it work?

Battle on the river

GARY PORTER / GPORTER@JOURNALSENTINEL.COM

The Chicago River has become a key battle point in the fight to halt the spread of Asian carp. A canal built in the late 1800s to clean theriver of human waste helped create a pathway to the Great Lakes for invasive species of fish.

By DAN EGAN ● degan@journalsentinel.com

AUGUST 19, 2012

head carp and silver carp — have moved upthe Mississippi and Illinois rivers, and nowthey are here. They are now at the gates tothe Great Lakes and our action over thenext several days is designed to protectthose gates.”

Such a large-scale chemical assault on aNorth American waterway — one thatwould ultimately cost taxpayers about $3million — was unprecedented.

But the stakes on this stretch of canal,just 35 miles downstream from Lake Michi-gan, were high, and not just for the healthof the Great Lakes. The year before, in theheat of his 2008 presidential campaign,Obama had wooed the eight Great Lakesstates — including the prized purple bat-tlegrounds of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michi-gan, Ohio and Pennsylvania — with apromised “zero tolerance” policy for spe-cies invasions in the lakes that are alreadyan unstable stew thick with 186 foreign fish,mollusks, plants, bacteria, viruses and var-ious other invaders.

Now exotic species numbers 187 and 188were finning their way toward the world’slargest freshwater system, a drinking watersource for 40 million U.S. and Canadian res-idents and a home to a multibillion-dollarfishing industry.

It was no wonder the Obama administra-tion’s Davis, the former president of theAlliance for the Great Lakes, was dis-patched to the battlefront.

Asian carp are like nothing this continenthas ever seen. As fishermen in the carp-infested Mississippi basin will attest, thesefish don’t just invade. They conquer. Theydo it by attacking the food chain from thebottom, stripping away the plankton pop-ulations that — directly or indirectly —sustain all other fish species. Specimens ofbighead carp can grow to more than 100

JOURNAL SENTINEL FILES

Silver carp, agitated by the hum of boat motors, take to the air, becoming a danger to boaters and a hit on YouTube. Water skiing and jetboating have become treacherous on infested stretches of some rivers.

JOURNAL SENTINEL FILES

The Asian Carp Rapid Response team works in 2009 after fishtoxins were dumped in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, a steptaken to control the invasive fish.

GARY PORTER / GPORTER@JOURNALSENTINEL.COM

David Lodge (right), a University of Notre Dame ecologist and aformer Rhodes Scholar, turned to DNA in an effort to stop thespread of the Asian carp.

pounds and eat up to 20 pounds of planktonper day.

Silver carp are smaller but have becomeYouTube sensations because of their pen-chant for rocketing out of the water likemissiles when agitated by the hum of a boatmotor. They regularly send boaters to

emergency rooms with con-cussions and split lips. Waterskiing and jet boating havebecome treacherous on heavi-ly infested stretches of river inthe Mississippi basin. Imaginethe trouble these fish couldcause in the Great Lakesstates, home to more than 4million recreational boats,about a third of the U.S. total.

“I’m likening this action tochemotherapy,” the Obamaadministration’s Davis la-mented on the day the plan topoison the canal was an-

nounced. “Nobody wants to go through che-mo, but you do it to protect the good cellsfrom being overridden by the bad cells.That’s what this is.”

Now, at midmorning on the day of the poi-soning, Rogner was assuring reporters thefish kill was going precisely as planned.But there was a problem. Among all thedead bass, bullhead, gizzard shad, suckers,common carp and catfish bobbing to thesurface, no one had found a single Asiancarp.

Two men in particular had a great deal atstake in the blind hunt.

One was Maj. Gen. John Peabody of the

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a gruff sortwho seems to spend most of his wakinghours in combat fatigues. Peabody backedtemporarily closing the canal to barge traf-fic to allow the poisoning after his agencyhad turned to a cutting-edge method forsniffing out fish by searching for telltaletraces of their DNA, a practice betterknown to criminal forensics than to watermanagement.

This carp-hunting technique, so new ithad yet to be peer-reviewed or published ina scientific journal, had been pioneered byDavid Lodge, a University of Notre Dameecologist with an impeccable reputation —a former Rhodes Scholar — whom Peabodyhad teamed with to find the “leading edge”of the invasion. Lodge’s sampling indicated

ABOUT THISSTORYThis story drawsfrom researchcompiled since2006. It involvedmore than 100interviews and isbased on areview of thou-sands of pagesof documents,including courtfilings, govern-ment reports,scientific re-search papersand archivalmaterials.

COURTESY OF METROPOLITAN WATER RECLAMATION DISTRICT OF GREATER CHICAGO

The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal was built to protect Lake Michigan from wastewater. Construction of the 28 miles of canal cost ap-proximately $30 million in the late 1800s. This photo is a scan from a glass plate negative, dated May 22, 1895, and shows dynamite blast-ing through bedrock during construction.

CINCINNATI ENQUIRER

Maj. Gen. John Peabody of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers madeboyhood trips to the Lake Erie shore. That’s one of the reasons heis so invested in the fight against Asian carp.

that the fish had arrived at the site of thepoisoning.

Like a quarter-century ago, when DNAanalysis emerged as a bafflingly powerfultool to convict murderers and rapists, re-porters at the canal had many questionsabout how this environmental DNA sam-pling — dubbed eDNA — actually worked.But the man with the answers wasn’tthere. Lodge was 103 miles away, stuck inSouth Bend because he had a class toteach. He was also growing anxious as hefollowed news hitting the Internet thathinted the whole slaughter might turn outto be a boondoggle based on unproven sci-ence — his unproven science.

By late afternoon, thousands of fish weredead or dying. Government crews chasedafter them in a ragtag armada of motor-boats. The scene looked more like an ama-teur fishing tournament than an orches-trated government attack. Some who hadbeen brought in for the kill wore govern-ment-issued orange flotation suits, otherswore ill-fitting life jackets under camou-flaged hunting duds as they tried to netand identify each surfacing fish.

Night fell. Still, in all the barrels of toxiccarcasses headed for a landfill — ultimate-ly the poisoning of the canal would yieldabout 54,000 pounds of flesh — there wasno word of even one Asian carp.

Lodge’s water samples might have in-dicated that the carp were indeed invad-ing, but the fish floating to the surface told

a different story. The general would soonbe left with a stark choice. He could trustwhat the DNA evidence had revealed, thatthe canal — and Lake Michigan — wasapparently at the earliest stages of a bi-ological invasion. Or he could trust hiseyes.

An unnatural disasterThe station wagon pulled up to the

brown brick federal research lab in east-ern Arkansas loaded with a radical newweedkiller. It was a brisk November dayin 1963, a time when there was an increas-ing awareness of the potential perils of allthe herbicides and pesticides flowingdown our rivers, across our croplands andorchards, into our grocery aisles, onto ourdinner tables.

A clamor was growing for a smarter,gentler approach to combating unwantedcreatures and vegetation. Researchers atthe U.S. Department of Interior’s FishFarming Experimental Laboratory, locat-ed in the heart of Arkansas catfish coun-try, were trying to do just that when theytook delivery of what they hoped would bethe next generation of aquatic weed-con-trol agents.

The station wagon’s tailgate wasdropped and three cardboard boxes, eachwith two white arrows pointing up, werehauled through the lab doors. The label onthe boxes from Malaysia told the handlersthat this was not just another toxic chem-

COURTESY OF METROPOLITAN WATER RECLAMATION DISTRICT OF GREATER CHICAGO

Excavation of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal lasted from 1892 to 1900. The 160-foot-wide and 24-foot-deep artificial waterway al-lowed the City of Chicago to reverse the flow of the Chicago River, sending its sewage into the Mississippi River basin instead of LakeMichigan.

ical compound whipped up in a lab. It read:“Live Fish.”

The boxes contained dozens of juvenilegrass carp, a species native to Asia and fa-mous for taking to forests of seaweed likelocusts to crops. The idea at the researchlab was to deploy these fish instead ofchemicals across the South to clean fishfarm ponds as well as weed-choked riversand irrigation ditches.

“When they did this, this was right. Thiswas the thing to do,” said Andrew Mitchell,a recently retired researcher at the Arkan-sas lab.

“It was one fish to do one job — keepchemicals out of the environment.”

Instead, it opened the door to what couldshape up to be a billion-dollar biologicalblunder.

That station wagon’s payload was thefirst documented shipment into the UnitedStates of the group of fish collectivelyknown as Asian carp. Within a decade ofthe grass carp’s arrival, Arkansas fishfarmers would import three other carp spe-cies: black, bighead and silver.

These four fish are almost cartoonish inthat each has its own particular invasivesuperpower. Grass carp devour stringy veg-etation; black carp gobble mollusks; big-head and silver vacuum up free-floatingplankton. All have escaped into the watersof North America, but it’s the bighead andsilver carp that have caused the most trou-ble and now threaten to turn the GreatLakes into what some government officialshave called one giant “carp pond.”

It is an ecological and economic mess no-body saw coming. The fear at the time thefish arrived was whether researchers couldeven get them to reproduce, because breed-ing the fish in hatcheries proved to be anabsurdly intricate procedure that requiredprecise timing and water conditions, aswell as injections of crushed fish pituitaryglands and human hormones harvestedfrom the urine of pregnant women.

So nobody was worried in the early 1970swhen a fish farmer got in touch with theArkansas Game and Fish Commission andarranged to turn over a batch of bigheadand silver carp he’d unintentionally impor-ted while attempting to buy his own crop ofgrass carp. State fishery workers couldhave destroyed these Adams and Eves. In-stead, according to the personal records ofthe fish farmer housed in the archives atthe University of Central Arkansas, thestate hatchery workers decided to try to getthe novel brood to reproduce.

They had no luck until Taiwanese aqua-culture expert S.Y. Lin was flown in fromhis United Nations’ posting in Washington,

D.C. Lin took two 12-pound silver carp andhatched nearly 1 million tiny silver carpfry. He fertilized the eggs from one 15-poundbighead and made about 20,000 baby big-heads.

It wasn’t long before the Arkansas Gameand Fish Commission entered into a con-tract with the U.S. Environmental Protec-tion Agency to employ the curious carp insewage treatment experiments. Former Ar-kansas Game and Fish Chairman MikeFreeze explained that Arkansas waterwaysin the 1970s were like everywhere else inthe country — ridiculously filthy, in partbecause small communities didn’t have ad-equate sewage treatment systems.

So Arkansas turned to the carp. PhaseOne of the state’s plan was to plant big-heads and silvers in experimental sewagelagoons and let them convert human wasteinto fish flesh. Phase Two would be to sellthose fish as food to fund small cities’ sew-age treatment costs.

“I remember we sent sample after sample(of fish) from the sewage ponds to BaylorUniversity to make sure they didn’t haveany viruses or things like that,” saidFreeze. Then the federal Food and Drug Ad-ministration swept in. “They had a stand-ing policy that it was not legal to take thesefish out of sewage ponds and sell them forhuman consumption.”

The experiments soon stopped when fed-eral funding dried up. Some fish were des-troyed. Others were simply set free.

Freeze, who has retired from the Gameand Fish Commission and is now a privatefish farmer, looks back at his days workingin the state’s Asian carp breeding programand remembers containment screensswinging open and gates being lifted todrain hatchery ponds — and their inhabit-ants — into Arkansas streams.

Freeze said he believes there were sub-sequent escapes from research facilities inNorthern states, but he acknowledged thatthese Arkansas bighead and silver carp al-most surely were the first to get into thewild. Ever since, Freeze has ruefully fol-lowed from afar their migration north to-ward the Great Lakes — the grandest waterbodies the fish could ever hope to colonize.

“I’m old enough and big enough to saythat there are a lot of things in my life thatI’d go back and change,” he said.

Blind justicesWhile there are several potential path-

ways for the jumbo carp to make their wayinto the Great Lakes, by far the biggest isthe Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. It is a160-foot-wide and 24-foot-deep artificial wa-terway that opened in 1900 in an audacious

move by Chicago leaders to keep their citybooming.

Before the canal was built, Chicagoflushed its sewage and industrial wastestraight into the Chicago River, whichoozed like foul lava into Lake Michigan —the source of the city’s drinking water. Theflaws of such a sewage system are as obvi-ous today as they were fatal then; news re-ports from the 1890s show that as many as2,000 Chicagoans were dying from typhoidfever each year.

Eventually Chicago city planners decidedto build a canal that would reverse the di-rection of the city’s namesake river so thatit flowed out of Lake Michigan and into theMississippi basin. That would allow Chica-go to literally flush its waste toward theGulf of Mexico and provide an economicboost to the region by opening a barge cor-ridor between Chicago and New Orleans.

It’s not surprising that the city of St. Lou-is, which to this day draws its drinking wa-ter from the Mississippi River, did not wantto start drinking Chicago’s sewage, evenwatered down as it was by the time itflowed into town.

In January 1900, the State of Missouri pe-titioned the U.S. Supreme Court to blockthe canal opening. That prompted Chicagoleaders to sneak out of town in the earlyhours of Jan. 17 and open the canal gatesbefore the court could stop them. There waslittle pomp in a ceremony The New YorkTimes characterized as one conducted with“undignified haste,” at the conclusion ofwhich a pale green tongue of Lake Michi-gan water crashed into the Mississippi ba-sin.

“Water in Chicago River Now ResemblesLiquid,” a Times headline deadpanned.

The Mississippi River basin and the GreatLakes have been unnaturally connectedever since.

The reversal solved Chicago’s drinkingwater troubles, but in making its case tothe Supreme Court, Missouri reported theannual number of typhoid fever cases in St.Louis approximately doubled in the fouryears after the canal opened compared withthe four years prior. Even so, Missouri hada hard time convincing the justices of theSupreme Court that Chicago toilets werethe problem.

It was the turn of the 20th century, andthe science of microbiology was in its in-fancy. The plaintiffs contended that the ty-phoid bacillus could survive the eight to 18days it took for Lake Michigan water totravel the 357 river miles down to St. Louis.The defense argued it could not. And thejustices were left dubious about the dangerposed by an invisible menace.

“There is nothing which can be detectedby the unassisted senses — no visible in-crease of filth, no new smell,” Justice Oli-ver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in the court’smajority opinion, rendered in 1906. “On thecontrary, it is proved that the great volumeof pure water from Lake Michigan which ismixed with the sewage at the start, has im-proved the Illinois river in these respects toa noticeable extent. Formerly it was slug-gish and ill smelling. Now it is a compara-tively clear stream.”

Today it is clear that dangerous — evendeadly — microbes can lurk in the purest-looking glass of water. But more than 100years ago the justices apparently trustedtheir eyes.

“The plaintiff’s case depends on an infer-ence of the unseen,” Holmes concluded indismissing the case.

The typhoid fever troubles largely evap-orated with advances in sewage treatmentand water purification in subsequent de-cades, and Illinois’ Great Lakes neighborslearned to live with a slightly diminishedLake Michigan because the canal was builtto siphon away up to 6 billion gallons of wa-ter per day (the subject of another SupremeCourt case filed by Wisconsin in the 1920s).But by the late 20th century, the larger, un-seen costs of tinkering with the hydrologyof a continent were coming into focus, andthey had nothing to do with water levels onLake Michigan or downstream cases of di-arrhea. It became apparent that Chicagohad accidentally built a superhighway forinvasive species to spread across the conti-nent.

Unwanted species often initially enter theGreat Lakes via the St. Lawrence Seaway —a separate canal system hundreds of milesto the east that created an artificial ship-ping link between the Great Lakes and theAtlantic Ocean. Ships sailing up the sea-way have delivered dozens of unwantedspecies into the lakes since it opened morethan a half-century ago.

The Chicago canal has turned this region-al problem into a national one that is ever-growing as species migrate from the GreatLakes to the Mississippi — and beyond.Pipe-clogging invasive mussels native tothe Caspian Sea region metastasized out ofthe Great Lakes through the Chicago canaland now threaten billions of dollars’ worthof irrigation and power-generating infra-structure as far away as Nevada and Cali-fornia.

But trouble floats both ways on the canal.Scientists have identified 39 additional in-vasive species poised to ride its waters intoor out of the Great Lakes.

In 1996, trying to slam the invasive species

door that Chicago unwittingly opened, Con-gress funded a “demonstration” electricbarrier on the Chicago canal, about 25miles southwest of downtown. The barrierwas designed to shoot a round-the-clock,fish-incapacitating jolt into the water andstop invasive species from swimming out ofthe Great Lakes and into the Mississippibasin, which sprawls across some 1.2 mil-lion square miles — about 40% of the Low-er 48 states. Such barriers had been suc-cessful on streams and irrigation canals,but never on a waterway this big, and nev-er on one that is a major navigation corri-dor plied by thousands of barges annually.

After six years of designing, building anddebugging, the $1.5 million contraptionwent into service in 2002. But by then theGreat Lakes invasive fish that scientistshad feared would use the canal to escapeinto the Mississippi basin had already doneso. The barrier was then repurposed as adevice to halt the migration of Asian carpinto the lakes from the other direction.

Not long after the demonstration barrierwent into service, federal officials becameconvinced it was worth funding a more ro-bust version built to last decades and oper-ate at four times the strength of the origi-nal.

Construction of the bigger-and-better bar-rier started in 2004 but was not finished un-til 2006. Then it took nearly three years forthe government to actually turn it on. Thedelay was due largely to U.S. Coast Guardworries about electricity arcing betweenbarges, some of which carry petroleum andother flammable materials. Barrier safetystudies were dragging on into early August2008, when a no-nonsense Army Corps gen-eral arrived to take charge of the carp fight.

John Peabody’s résumé reveals an engi-neer who might fit in as well with jarheadsas gearheads. He’s a 1980 graduate of WestPoint who has done tours in the Pacific,Panama, Somalia and, most recently, theMiddle East, where he led 3,000 engineersinto Iraq during the 2003 attack on Bagh-dad.

In his three decades in uniform, Peabodypicked up a graduate degree in public ad-ministration from Harvard, studied as anOlmsted Scholar in Mexico City and earnedhis master parachutist badge. He has re-ceived a Bronze Star for valor as well as aPurple Heart. The 54-year-old general limpson a metal hip. He has a penchant for quot-ing war movie dialogue. He’s brusque withsubordinates.

But he was also once a little boy who rel-ished hot summer days at Lake Erie’s Nick-el Plate Park beach in Huron, Ohio.

“The night before, we’d get picnic bas-

kets, beach balls, all the rest, in our stationwagon — this was the ’60s . . . and mybrothers and I would get all excited: ‘Daddy,Daddy! Mommy’s taking us to the lake!’ ”said Peabody. “And my cynical dad wouldsay: ‘Your mother is taking you to the big-gest cesspool in northern Ohio.’ ”

Despite the stench of all the rotting fishcarcasses littering the polluted beach whenhe was a child — one of which Peabody viv-idly recalls gouging his foot — the GreatLakes stole a soft spot in the heart of thehard-nosed general, and that motivatedhim when he took over the carp fight.

“There was an opportunity for us to pre-vent a really bad thing from happening — acalamity, a crisis, whatever word you wantto put to that,” Peabody said in an inter-view this year in Vicksburg, Miss., after histransfer from the Great Lakes region to theArmy Corps’ Mississippi Valley Division.

Lake Erie’s pollution problems in the1960s — including fish-littered beaches andthe burning of the Cuyahoga River —helped prompt Congress to pass the 1972Clean Water Act, and since then Lake Erieand the other Great Lakes in many wayshave made a remarkable recovery.

But while chemical contaminants havebeen greatly reduced, the lakes today areplagued by a fresh pollution: their 186 non-native species. These foreign organismshave so ruptured the natural order ofthings that a commercial fisherman from1900 on the water today might fret he’dsailed off the globe and landed on anotherplanet altogether, one where things likequagga mussels, round gobies, sea lamprey,fishhook water fleas, alewives and bloodyred shrimp clutter his nets instead of laketrout, yellow perch and sturgeon.

The problem is more than just an ecologi-cal changing of the guard. The brew of exot-ics has unleashed noxious algae outbreaksthat smother beaches in foot-deep goo thatlooks like creamed spinach and smells likethe bowels of a porta potty. Invasive specieshave spawned botulism outbreaks in fishpopulations that have dominoed up thefood chain and killed tens of thousands ofbirds. Great Lakes invaders are also sus-pected of triggering outbreaks of microcys-tis, which produces a potentially deadlyliver toxin for humans.

If Asian carp invade the Great Lakes, biol-ogists are not exactly sure how much dam-age they would cause, because the lakes’plankton populations have already beendecimated by zebra and quagga mussels.But there is compelling evidence that carpcould at least thrive in the lakes’ warmerbays and harbors — places where fish andhumans tend to congregate.

Peabody knew the carp were a real threatto the lakes when he walked into the job,and he says he was “absolutely deter-mined” to beat them back, even though hedidn’t sense that same commitment fromhis sister agencies. “It seemed like we werethe one agency trying to do something,” hesaid as he ran his hands through his spikyblack hair. “It’s not that other agencies we-ren’t interested. It’s that it wasn’t high onpeople’s radar screens.”

In the months after he took over the job,Peabody turned on the new electric barrierbut authorized it to run only at the samevoltage as the nearby demonstration barri-er, 1 volt per inch, even though it was de-signed to run as high as 4 volts. One voltdoes not provide a strong enough jolt tostop a juvenile fish, but it was a level thebarge industry could live with and, at thetime, the closest visible Asian carp popula-tion was about 15 miles downstream.

“If the fish weren’t close enough to be athreat, it didn’t seem prudent at that timeto raise the (barrier’s) operating param-

eters,” Peabody said. That was a big if, and Peabody knew it.

Population modeling that used the pace ofthe Asian carp’s migration up the Missis-sippi and Illinois rivers indicated the fishshould have long ago been probing the bar-rier area, even though crews using nets andelectro-shocking devices continued to turnup zero evidence of fish in the area. Every-one involved knew that finding the first fewfish at the leading edge of the invasionwould be exceedingly difficult.

The nets might have been coming up emp-ty, but Peabody was nervous nonetheless.

“Our lack of information was so great. Ifelt we had to take whatever we could andapply it as quickly as possible to try and getmore information,” he said.

Then he paused and drew a deep breaththrough his nose.

“So we did that. I think you know the restof the story.”

Wednesday: Water samples at the barrier turn up DNA evidence of Asian carp,but where are the fish?

A history of Asian carp in the United States� 1870s: U. S. Fish Commission, a predecessor to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, begins a hatchery and fish planting program for common carp, a popular food fish that had been imported from Europe.� 1893: Common carp are recorded in the Great Lakes.� 1963: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service imports from Malaysia the first grass carp to the federal research facility in Stuttgart, Ark.� 1966: First believed escape of those fish.� 1970: State of Arkansas begins planting grass carp in weed-infested waters across the state.� 1973: An Arkansas fish farmer, seeking his own stock of grass carp, receives a shipment of grass, black, bighead and silver carp from Taiwan. This is believed to be the first record of bighead, silver and black carp arriving in the U.S., though some accounts place the bighead’s arrival in 1972.

� 1974: The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, which agreed to take the

bighead, black and silver carp from the fish farmer, begins attempting to breed those fish. � 1979: Arkansas Game and Fish, working with a grant from the U.S.

Environmental Protection Agency, undertakes sewage treatment experiments using silver and bighead carp.� 1980: Silver carp reported swimming in the wild.

2002: Experimental electrical barrier installed on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, about 35 miles from the Lake Michigan shoreline. That same year biologists find bighead carp about 21 miles downriver from the barrier site.

2003: A common carp is tracked swimming through the electrical barrier. Operators crank up the

power, and the barrier fails for 25 hours. Biologists don’t believe any Asian carp passed through the barrier during the power failure.� 2004: Ground broken on new, more robust barrier.� 2009: New barrier turned on, but not at voltage strong enough to repel juvenile fish. In November, first positive DNA samples arrive showing evidence of fish above the barrier. Coalition of Great Lakes States responds by turning to the courts to force the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and State of Illinois to do more to stop the fish.� 2011: Barrier turned up to voltage strong enough to repel juvenile fish. Positive DNA samples continue to come in showing evidence of fish beyond the barrier in Chicago canal waters.� 2012: University of Notre Dame reports positive DNA samples in Lake Erie.

The first grass carp shipment from Malaysia was delivered Nov. 16, 1963, at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service laboratory at Stuttgart, Ark.

Photo: “Draft Management and Control Plan for Asian Carps in the United States,” April 2006

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