The Foreign Animal Invasion On Chicago Continues: Asian Carp Are En Route To Lake Michigan

Source—Asian carp are likely to find enough food to spread farther if they establish breeding populations in Lake Michigan, reinforcing the importance of preventing the invasive fish from gaining a foothold, scientists said in a paper released Monday.

Authorities have long debated how to keep them out of the Great Lakes, where fishing is a $7 billion industry. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this year proposed equipping the Brandon Road Lock and Dam near Joliet, Illinois, with noisemakers, electric barriers and other deterrents at a cost of at least $778 million.

“We are on the verge of an unstoppable crisis for the Great Lakes region, and now is our best chance to stop these aggressive fish from crashing our economy and environment,” said Molly Flanagan, vice president of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, an advocacy group that favors the Brandon Road Lock and Dam upgrade.

Can we quit smuggling these wild beasts into the city already? It’s bad enough out here without crocodiles and monster fish storming in. I mean we all might as well move to the jungle at this rate:

First Humboldt Park lagoon shatters its old record with 2 gators/2 weeks.

Then some other asshole gets caught up with an alligator in the city.

Somewhere along the way parrots started getting involved.

And now these savage fish are about to wind up on every divorced lawyer’s boat in The Playpen and in the background of every future Chicago Smokeshow of the Day’s Boomerang.

Give us a break already. I’m not smart enough to know why this is happening to us, but what I do know is that we put up with 6 months of winter around here so that we don’t have to deal with this kind of shit. If I wanted to be surrounded by alligators and malicious fish on a daily basis then I’d move to one of the swamp states where I could at least enjoy the year-round warm weather. Not trying to freeze my balls off from November through April just to get demoted to 2nd on the food chain come May. Let’s leave the Asian fish in Asia from now on.

But I guess the invasion is up in the air at this point because apparently Lake Michigan is so filthy that the carp might not even be able to survive in it? Good to know after half the city has already been chilling in it all summer long.

Per source — Cory D. Suski, an associate professor in the U of I’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, says for years Asian carp in the Illinois River have stayed put, choosing, with rare exceptions, not to go farther upstream, through the rivers and canals that make up the Chicago Area Waterway System, and into Lake Michigan.

“For whatever reason, they haven’t moved,” said Suski. “And it’s been about a decade. So water levels will go up and down, and concentrations of things will go up and down, but it’s been pretty consistent for about ten years. So it would seem that there’s something persistent there that they’re responding to negatively.

Suski believes they stop at the Illinois River headwaters to avoid pollution coming downstream from Chicago area waterways, including the Chicago River.

Let’s hope they don’t bombard our lake soon. Would be a real shame if they subsequently made their way into that dump of a river by tomorrow.

A real shame.