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Asian carp could become the most common fish in Lake Erie if the ravenous invaders develop a breeding population there, while popular sport species including walleye and rainbow trout likely would decline, scientists said Monday.
A newly published study based on computer modeling projected that bighead and silver carp, which are Asian carp species, eventually could make up about one-third of the total fish weight in Erie, which has the most fish of the five Great Lakes even though it's the smallest by volume. |
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"They would be quite abundant," said Ed Rutherford, a fisheries biologist with the federal Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor and a member of the study team, which included scientists from several U.S. and Canadian universities and government offices.
The carp, which have overrun the Mississippi River and many of its tributaries since being imported to the southern U.S. from Asia in the 1970s to cleanse sewage treatment ponds, gorge on tiny plants and animals known as plankton that all fish eat at some point in life. They are migrating northward toward the Great Lakes, where agencies have spent more than $300 million to keep them out. |
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