As plan for invasive carp barrier hits another snag, scientists and citizens employ creative strategies to protect Lake Michigan
A small fleet made its way up the Illinois River, its crew armed with landing nets and football helmets as if to fend off an invasion.
Minutes after launching from the riverbank in the village of Bath, a frenzied, almost comical scene unfolded.
Freshwater sprayed the faces of the participants, followed by mud and then the blood of their adversaries as hundreds of silvery fish leaped into the air, some landing in the boats, others smacking the fishermen upside the head.
“They’re never going to get rid of them,” said Onedia Wolverton, of Missouri, who has been joining her son and his family at the Original Redneck Fishing Tournament for more than a decade. Her grandson, who is about to start college, has been coming since he was a little kid.
As invasive carp have advanced on Lake Michigan, Illinoisans, frustrated with the pace of state and federal deterrent plans, have taken matters into their own hands. Some efforts include fishing tournaments like the one in Bath earlier this month; others involve attempts to create a market for the fish as a food source.
In the wings is an innovative, multipronged plan, the result of input from countless U.S., Canadian and tribal agencies over the past couple of decades, that would install a “gantlet” system in the Des Plaines River at Brandon Road Lock and Dam near Joliet to stop silver and bighead carp from reaching the Great Lakes.
The $1.14 billion project is funded by the federal government and the states of Illinois and Michigan. Although the cost estimate has increased and progress has been slow, the project is in the last stages of design as Illinois prepares to sign an agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to begin construction.
But the plan has hit another snag as invasive carp remain only 50 miles from Lake Michigan. Riverfront land in Joliet needed for the project is the site of a former coal plant, raising questions about whether the state of Illinois will or even should agree to buy potentially polluted land and take responsibility for any hazardous waste cleanup.
Molly Flanagan, chief operating officer and vice president for programs at the Alliance for the Great Lakes, said she hopes Illinois signs the agreement before the end of the year so the project stays on track and the construction phase can begin in 2024.
“It’s much less expensive to keep the species out of the Great Lakes than it is to try to control it once it’s there,” Flanagan said. “I think that really emphasizes the urgency of taking action to stop these fish before they do move, as a reproducing population, past where they are now. I think we still have a good opportunity to stop the advance of invasive carp, but we need to act sooner (rather) than later.”
Family affair, regional concern
Loud motors can scare invasive silver carp into jumping up to 5 feet in the air, sometimes leaving boaters with bloody noses, black eyes and bruises.
Almost two decades ago, longtime Bath resident Betty DeFord took a pontoon boat out to the river one day and was torpedoed by a carp. That’s when she — and the other villagers for whom the river was a source of leisure and livelihood — decided they had had enough.
“That stupid thing jumped up and hit me and bruised my shoulder, knocked my glasses off,” DeFord said. “It got to where you couldn’t go out and fish or boat ride because these fish were jumping in your boat. Everybody’s like, ‘What are those things?’ Well, it was the silver carp invading us. It was a stress reliever, being in open water. And the fish took it away from me, and I was not gonna let them do it.”
That was the genesis of the Original Redneck Fishing Tournament, and now her children and grandchildren help run the event. “Bring your boats. Get rid of these darn things,” DeFord said.
Silver carp jump when disturbed by noise because of a peculiarity in their anatomy, according to Scott Whitney, chief of project management at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Rock Island District, which oversees the Brandon Road project.
“They have a unique connection between the inner ear and their swim bladder, which creates an echo chamber, so to speak, and sends pain signals directly to their brain, causing them to escape and jump out of the water,” he said.
This unique characteristic means silver carp can be easily scooped mid-leap with landing nets.
Silver carp, like bighead carp, don’t care for bait because they are “filter feeders” and thus eat plankton from the base of the aquatic food chain. Due to their large numbers and reproductive capacity, they are able to outcompete and starve native fish and mussels. Bighead carp are nearly nonstop eaters that regularly reach 40 pounds and can top 100 pounds.
The disruption of food chains would have an “enormous” impact, Flanagan said, on the $7 billion fishing industry as invasive carp displace native fish. Because of their leaping ability, silver carp also put recreational boaters at risk and threaten billions in tourism dollars in the Great Lakes region.
An unknown at Brandon Road
In June, the Michigan legislature approved $64 million to help fund construction of the Brandon Road project, which combined with $50 million from Illinois covered the $114 million required for the local cost share of the project.
The next step is for the state of Illinois to sign a project partnership agreement with the Army Corps in order to unlock federal funds. Whitney said a project of this magnitude requires a lot of T’s to be crossed and I’s to be dotted.
“There’s concerns about the real estate, there’s concerns about hazardous toxic waste, which is the responsibility of the nonfederal sponsor (Illinois) to both acquire land and make sure that land is free of any contaminants before they can transfer it to the federal government,” Whitney said, noting that those matters are being discussed between the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and the Army Corps.
Flanagan said the main sticking point has to do with real estate. “They need a staging ground for construction and the land along the bank of the river is land that (was) owned by Midwest Generation,” she said. “And it’s unknown whether that land is contaminated.”
NRG acquired the Midwest Generation fleet in 2014 and converted the Joliet coal plant to natural gas. It also shut down the dirtiest units at its Romeoville plant. In 2019, the Illinois Pollution Control Board ruled in favor of the Sierra Club, Prairie Rivers Network and the Environmental Law and Policy Center in a yearslong lawsuit over groundwater being contaminated with chemicals found in coal ash from four former Midwest Generation plants in Illinois. The litigants have since been in a phase to determine possible remedies.
“There definitely is cleanup to be done, at least somewhere on that property,” Flanagan said, emphasizing that she doesn’t have any details about the lawsuit and remedy phase. “That would be an additional cost to the state of Illinois. And it’s a cost that we can’t really predict because we don’t have any idea how contaminated the land is. I think part of the issue with the Midwest Generation land is that it sets a bad precedent if the government is responsible for cleaning up pollution from a private industry.”
The director of the IDNR’s Office of Water Resources, Loren Wobig, said the state of Illinois and its agencies are considering “potential risks” and costs related to acquiring land with possibly contaminated groundwater.
“We believe there’s the potential for hazardous waste, based on just the history of the parcel (of land) that we need to complete this project,” Wobig said. “So we’ve been speaking with the private property owner about that, and we are actually trying to explore alternative ways to go forward to still acquire a strip of land along that right descending bank for the project. Those are actively ongoing discussions with NRG.”
Dave Schrader, senior manager of communications at NRG, said in an emailed statement that “Midwest Generation appreciates the difficult work the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and Army Corps of Engineers are doing to protect native fish in the Great Lakes region. In support of those efforts, Midwest Generation has ongoing communications with the agencies to evaluate potential use of riverfront property at our Joliet station.”
“We’re hopeful that we can find a path forward there,” Wobig said, “because truly addressing these land rights concerns, play into then being able to remove some of the concerns we have in the project partnership agreement.”
Why are carp here?
The term “Asian carp” generally refers to different kinds of carp, but scientists now prefer to call the four invasive species in the United States by their specific names: silver, bighead, grass carp and black carp.
They were introduced in 1963 as a way to get rid of seaweed without using chemicals in aquaculture facilities and sewage ponds in Arkansas. After extreme flooding events in the 1980s and 1990s, the carp escaped into the Mississippi River basin — the third largest in the world — spreading to 31 states. Some were also released after breeding experiments failed.
“What happened is that they were introduced into this country, like many species, with the thought that initially they were going to provide a great benefit to people,” said Chris Korleski, co-chair of the Invasive Carp Regional Coordinating Committee, a multiagency work group. “They were placed into ponds, for example, to control vegetation. But like many invasive species, they quickly left whatever ponds (or streams) they were originally put in.”
Silver and bighead carp don’t have natural predators in American waterways, and likely never will. That means their populations can grow uncontrollably and damage aquatic ecosystems.
“I keep hoping for a natural predator for these, because that’s the way it usually works,” DeFord, the tournament founder, said. “If you have an overflow of one certain species, sometimes in time, nature has a way of taking care of itself. And I keep hoping and praying for the day that this will happen. It hasn’t happened. And it’s not gotten any better. It’s gotten worse.”
‘Integrated pest management’
In the 2000s, the Army Corps placed electric barriers in Romeoville to prevent the fish from getting into Lake Michigan — “right now, that’s the last line of defense from invasive carp,” Flanagan said.
“There are a couple of issues with this,” she added. “There have been studies that have shown that juvenile fish can get through the electric barrier … that’s why it’s important to get additional protections in place. It’s good, it’s very good that those barriers are there. We need to make sure they continue operating, and we need to do more.”
Given the crucial economic role of the lock and dam in Illinois’ inland waterway transportation network, Brandon Road project leaders decided against shutting it down and instead experimented with different technologies that complement each other.
This approach is known as “integrated pest management.” That is, bringing “everything you can to bear (down) on” the invasive species, according to Whitney.
Having spent decades tackling invasive species such as sea lamprey, zebra mussels and, of course, carp, Whitney said he noticed a commonality in such creatures: “Once they’re here, they’re here to stay.”
This is why he says the opportunity at Brandon Road is unique. “There’s a doorway here, and it’s always open for an invasion to get through,” Whitney said. “And rarely do we have an opportunity with any of these invasions to stop them in their tracks, so to speak.
“Even if we had a silver bullet for these invasive carp, how do you treat a system the size of the Mississippi? You can’t overfish them; you can’t eat your way out of this problem,” he said. “But all of those, combined into an integrated management strategy to limit their populations, limit their movements, give advantages to native species. These are some of the things we found that work over the last few decades. And that’s why so much energy in this partnership is looking at a variety of things, not just one single approach.”
Under the plan, when silver and bighead carp approach the Brandon Road Lock and Dam, they will encounter an acoustic deterrent and an air bubble curtain. The bubbles will serve as a physical barrier but also remove small fish trapped under barges or carried in their wake.
The fish that are able to make it past this curtain will then go through an engineered channel that will extend the length of the current lock and allow for the more effective deployment of technologies, including making it easier to clean out fish and debris.
At the end of the channel, persistent carp will run into a familiar foe: an electric barrier like the ones in Romeoville. After that, a larger array of acoustic deterrents will create painful sound waves for the carp, keeping them at bay. On the other side will be a flushing lock that will send any remaining larval fish and eggs back downstream.
Whitney said that, even with the extreme weather Illinois has recently endured and will likely continue to experience because of climate change, the project at Brandon Road won’t be overwhelmed by more intense rains and flooding. Brandon Road, he explained, is “not like any other lock and dam in the system, where floodwaters go up and around it. It is high enough, and the only way through it is through that lock chamber. And that’s why it makes the ideal location to put up our battle there.”
Korleski, from the invasive carp work group, also said the barriers are not going to be built just for the occasional big storm.
“The design is intended to take into account truly, truly, truly significant rainstorms,” he said. “There’s a significant margin of comfort built into these, because there’d be no point in designing them for a storm that you get every other week. You’re really worried about the storms you get that aren’t that frequent, but that dump large amounts of water.”
From cowboys to copi
The invasive carp threat has inspired regular citizens like Betsy DeFord to join the fight through events like the redneck fishing tournament. In another theatrical strategy, commercial fishermen or “carp cowboys” have rounded up countless fish farther up the Illinois River.
“A lot of attention is paid to the structural project,” said Wobig from the IDNR. “The efforts by Illinois, Michigan and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that deal with overfishing, commercial fishing — all that promotion of the nonstructural side is huge as well, and certainly is making an impact and making a difference.”
These efforts, however, require buy-in from citizens.
Last year, the IDNR spearheaded a campaign to rebrand invasive carp as “copi” and make the name more palatable. Carp can be fried and eaten as a meal of traditional fish and chips, or made into anything from patties to gumbo. Visitors at the 2023 Illinois State Fair, which runs through Aug. 20, will find copi nuggets, rangoon, empanadas and sliders from Flippin’ Fish Shack in Conservation World.
“I think the idea there was definitely to try to bring citizens into the issue, by getting them to directly have an impact by eating invasive carp,” Korleski said. He referred to similar efforts to change the common — and unappealing — names of certain kinds of fish like the slimehead and Patagonian toothfish to orange roughy and Chilean sea bass, respectively. The silver carp was previously rebranded for human consumption as silverfin in 2009 by Louisiana chef Philippe Parola.
Scientists have pointed out that silver carp constitute a high-quality protein and pose a lower risk to human health than other food fish do, given that they feed at the base of the food chain and toxic chemicals don’t accumulate as much in their bodies. They are, however, extremely hard to fillet given their boniness.
“Chef Parola from Louisiana has been here, and he was here again last year showing people how to cook them and stuff. They’re edible, but there’s so many bones in the silver ones,” DeFord said. “Now we’re eating them because we don’t know how else to do it.”
After anglers in the redneck fishing tournament catch and weigh thousands of pounds of silver carp, vendors from neighboring villages and towns bring coolers to collect the unwanted remains — a haul that can be sold for different purposes like human food, cat food and plant fertilizer.
But these enterprises might not gain a significant foothold anytime soon. “I think it’s just going to take time for this to turn into something that’s viewed as a very useful commodity, that there will be a demand for,” Korleski said.
Fighting other invasives
The integration of numerous agencies and use of multiple strategies in the Brandon Road project may prevent the silver and bighead carp from getting into the Great Lakes. And down the road, this effort may lead to approaches that can benefit scientists who are battling other invasive species like the sea lamprey and zebra mussel.
In the meantime, amateur anglers from all over will continue gathering every year in the village of Bath to fish out thousands of pounds of silver carp from the Illinois River.
“Every year I tell people that come from all over: ‘Keep them out of your waters, because once you get them you’re not going to get rid of them,’” DeFord said. “If you can’t kill them off, we do our small part to get rid of them and we do hold them off. It’s our small way of trying to help. I’m just a simple mother, wife, grandmother, great-grandmother.”
On the day before the tournament began, a carp was picked up on a monitor approaching the channel at Brandon Road, according to Whitney. “And I’m sure with him were a thousand of his best friends,” he said. “So that’s a pretty pressing wake-up call, because we’ve been saying all along we’re fighting a battle against the clock.”
