Suddenly something broke out of the water and landed with a smack about ten feet away. A carp! Then another, then another. We hadn’t been on the water for more than five minutes when I was able to scoop up my first five-pound carp from where it had been stunned by the electricity. The relief at dropping it into the live well was enormous. As of that moment, the trip was a success and I knew I hadn’t driven close to nine hundred miles, not counting the return trip, for nothing.
Carp were leaping everywhere. At times there were a dozen in the air at once. Pretty soon we didn’t even need the electrofishing gear. Huge carp were jumping straight into the boat without any encouragement from us. It was perhaps the most amazing thing in nature I’d ever witnessed. Big silvery torpedoes of some twenty pounds launched themselves out of the water as high as ten feet in a fast graceful arc right into the middle of the boat. They smacked into the aluminum and flopped around in bloody confusion as I tried to pounce on one, even as another came hurtling in.
It’s not often that anything turns out to be exactly as advertised. The silver carp situation in Missouri is one of those few.
As stunning as this was to experience, it’s a real problem on many rivers. Think about what happens when a twenty-pound missile of meat and bone hits you in the face. People have already suffered broken bones. One young man went through months of reconstructive surgery after his face was crushed by a particularly large carp. It’s only a matter of time before someone is killed; a small child could easily die from one of these hitting the wrong spot. Boaters realize this, and there has been a big reduction in pleasure boating on tributaries of the Missouri. This is not a good thing. When people stop seeing a river, they begin to care less about protecting it.
The oddest part of the story is that silver carp are not known for engaging in this behavior in China. They’ll jump now and then, but nothing like what happens in the United States. I’m reminded of the black spiny-tailed iguanas in Florida and their unexpected carnivorousness.
What the leaping silver carp and the rapacious iguanas have in common is that both of these invasive populations descend from a bottleneck population of just a few introductions. One explanation could be that an unusual characteristic — even one that’s actually disadvantageous — can become widespread if the other advantages the species has in that new environment are great enough. Such a characteristic, like jumping straight out of the water at the sound of a boat’s propeller, might disappear from the gene pool before it was even noticed by humans in the original and more competitive environment. When there are only a few individuals in a new habitat where there are few predators and an advantage in feeding behavior, that oddball trait could persist and eventually become normal.
This was what happened with the silver carp. Jumping out of the water and smashing into things doesn’t do them a bit of good. Aside from the boat, I saw carp accidentally flopping themselves out on shore, hitting tree trunks, and getting tangled up in the branches of fallen trees. In some cases, these fish were beating themselves bloody, and nothing useful whatsoever results from this bizarre action. Yet they have such an advantage in feeding behavior over other fish that they still dominate.
As highly efficient filter feeders, they don’t have to burn calories swimming in order to eat. Nor do they have to leave a place that feels safe. As long as the current is flowing and has some zooplankton and phytoplankton in it, they don’t need to go anywhere. Every time this fish breathes, it eats.
In the space of fifteen minutes we had more than a hundred pounds of fish on board. Even at that, none of the Missourians seemed impressed. They were almost apologetic at the lack of any forty- or fifty-pounders. For my part, the state had more than lived up to its “Show Me” reputation.
Vince pointed out that we had plenty of silver carp and asked what I wanted to do next. What I really wanted to do was grab fish out of the air all day long, but I had a job to finish. We hadn’t gotten any common carp or bighead carp, and I wanted to conduct a taste test among the different species.
Bighead carp would be tough, Vince thought. But we’d try.
Bigheads look as if they were put together upside down. Their eyes are absurdly low on their heads. They were brought to the United States for the same reasons silver carp were. They’re also filter feeders and have a similar impact on a habitat where they’ve become common. But they differ from silver carp in two ways.
First, bigheads absorb somewhat larger particles than silver carp do. Silver carp get more food out of every gulp of water in the long run. As a result, there are fewer bigheads in a given stretch of water as silver carp numbers increase (although bigheads colonize a new area first).
Second, bigheads don’t jump. Unlike silver carp but like grass carp, they’re shy about anything happening above the water’s surface. Bigheads and grass carp swim away from approaching boats, humans, and electrical current in the water. This habit makes them difficult to sample with electrofishing gear.
The tactic Kevin and Vince used was to approach piles of brush along the banks and then crank up the current. At first I thought bigheads prefer that type of underwater structure, but I later found out that this ploy works only now and then, because when the bigheads swim away from the boat and into the brush, they get tangled up and can’t escape quickly enough from the current before they get a full dose of electricity and float to the surface.
We didn’t manage to get any bigheads, but we did stumble upon a nice fat common carp. Bagging two invasive species in one day is always a successful outing, in my opinion. My satisfaction was dampened, though, because aside from the baby shad (usually under three inches in length), the native fish in our electrofishing survey were outnumbered at least fifty to one by invasive carp. This was not a healthy, biodiverse river.
Back at the field station, we filleted the carp and prepared to cook them. Cleaning carp properly is very different from working on most other fish. You carve off the fillets without bothering to gut the fish. Although refrigerated fillets will keep as well as the meat of any other fish, if they’re attached to the rest of the fish, they’ll quickly spoil. The clock is ticking faster than it is for a largemouth bass or a trout. I later spoke with a commercial carp fisherman and broker who refuses to buy from other fishermen if the carp aren’t still alive. Perhaps this is why so many Americans think carp is inedible. If they carry it around on a stringer for too long before eating it, the result won’t do much for their appetite.
Vince offered an excellent tip for prepping carp: Unless you like a very fishy-tasting fish, remove and discard the dark red flesh. There isn’t much of it, but it’s clearly visible on a fillet and you can trim it off easily.
After most of the fish were carved up, Vince heated oil in a pan on a charcoal fire out back. While we waited for the coals to settle down, we were joined by Duane Chapman, research fish biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. Duane doesn’t toot his own horn, but other biologists have assured me that he’s the world’s top expert on invasive carp.
Duane is a big man, maybe six foot four, with a dark black beard and a ruddy tan from a lot of field hours. We sat at a picnic table and there commenced an hour and a half of the best conversation about fish I’ve ever had.
Duane’s research is pragmatic, and focuses on eradication. Right now he’s working on mimicking a chemical mating signal that attracts mature bighead carp to a central location. Because bigheads make such an effort to avoid boats, this lure could make a big difference in scientists’ ability to accurately sample populations. It could also make simple work of netting a big heap of the fish in an eradication program.
The first plate of sizzling-hot battered silver carp came out of the oil and onto the picnic table. I blew on a piece to cool it, then popped it into my mouth. It didn’t have the outstanding flavor of lionfish; it actually didn’t have much flavor at all. It tasted like cod, or like any other firm whitefish. Very few Americans would be able to tell the difference.
Next came
a plate of the common carp. The flavor was slightly better in a way that I have difficulty describing. Sweeter, maybe? I liked them both, but the common carp was a tad better than the silver. After trying both species, I figured the concept of carp being inedible had to be the result of people eating fish that had hung around too long before being filleted. There was nothing fishy about either of them.
I left Missouri with a cooler full of carp and my head teeming with thoughts about entire rivers with hundreds of tons of a highly edible fish per mile and almost nobody in America eating them.
Before heading for Virginia, I had one more stop to make. Vince had arranged a meeting for me at an IHOP with a commercial fisherman named Cliff. Like a lot of other watermen today, Cliff cobbles together a living from a number of little things. He catches sturgeon for part of the year; he and his wife harvest the eggs for caviar, which they ship to buyers around the world, mostly in Russia and Japan. Cliff also fishes for catfish, bigheads, and silver carp.
He uses several types of large nets for different situations and different waters. He rounds up bigheads and catfish by laying out several hundred yards of long net around a dike, where the fish tend to congregate in large numbers. The fish are corralled tighter and tighter until the net can be hauled onto the boat.
Wild-caught catfish are an easy sell to domestic markets. Carp are a little tougher, but Cliff still gets paid. He sells some directly to local grocery stores, where they retail for about two dollars per pound. It’s always the least expensive meat in a store. A few years ago, there were very few buyers, but with the recession, folks have gotten less fussy. Large wholesalers are shipping carp fillets to China, where the heads are also popular in soup. In order to be salable, though, the heads must be of very high quality and cut just the right way. Most of what’s left is sold for as little as seven cents per pound and turned into fertilizer.
The biggest marketing hurdle in this country is that, as mentioned earlier, consumers don’t want to eat carp. If it had any other name, it would probably fly off the shelf (or, really, out of the freezer compartment or the fresh-fish counter). Cliff also mentioned the lack of factories equipped to process huge amounts of carp — a moot point until the public is ready to buy it.
According to Cliff, most of the other guys out there fishing for carp (they’re all men) are barely surviving. Many are locked into exclusive contracts with a large buyer that sends the heads to China and grinds the rest into fertilizer. They’re getting paid anywhere from seven to fifteen cents per pound, and the buyer sometimes goes months on end without paying them at all. They’d walk away, but there just aren’t any other jobs. Their equipment is falling apart and they can barely pay for the gas it takes to get out on the water. There isn’t much of an incentive for people to start catching carp in meaningful numbers.
If public demand for the fish causes the wholesale price to go up to twenty-five cents a pound, Cliff thinks that all of this will change. The fishermen will be able to pay their bills again, replace their tattered nets, and hire crews. More people will see it as a business worth getting into. If the public discovered what carp tastes like and came to value it even half as much as cod, the Missouri River system would begin to recover from the carp problem within a few years.
But can people really accept carp as a staple? Back home in Virginia, my wife fried strips of the carp I’d brought home and served them to our children, ages four and seven. They dipped the fish sticks in ketchup and tartar sauce and ate most of what was on their plates. They never bothered to ask what it was.
Nutria
Months after returning from the lizard hunt on Boca Grande, I got an e-mail from Jeff Latham, the journalist I’d met there. We’d kept in touch online since meeting in Florida, and now he wanted to pitch an article about my work with invasive species to a national men’s magazine. We went down the list of species and trips that I had coming up, and after a long detour in which we hoped to be running off to Alsace-Lorraine for wild boar, we somehow settled on chasing nutria around the swamps of Louisiana.
In spite of the odd name, nutria is neither an artificial sweetener nor a brand of dog food. Rather, it’s a very large semiaquatic rodent from South America. Imagine a beaver with a round tail that breeds as rapidly as a Norwegian rat. Known by some indigenous peoples as coypu, the animal was encountered by Spanish explorers who seem to have mistaken it for the otter — thus its name, nutria, which is Spanish for otter. The name stuck and followed the animal to North America.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, nutria were exported around the United States and Europe for use as breeding stock on fur farms. The price of nutria skins was never as high as that of beaver skins, but the animals grew so big so rapidly that they could be raised in captivity much more easily and profitably. A female nutria can be ready to breed at three months old, and she can become pregnant again the day after giving birth.
As fur prices vacillated, fur-ranching operations occasionally went bust, and the remaining nutria were often released into the wild. Populations became established in Louisiana in the 1930s, though it was decades before anyone realized how much of a problem they would become.
Nutria usually live in small family groups in burrows they dig into the banks of bodies of water; this habit leads to heavy erosion. Riverbanks collapse and levees weaken to the point of failure. And as Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, Louisiana’s levee system is extremely important to the survival of its human inhabitants.
Nutria also out-compete the native muskrats, and sometimes beavers, for limited resources. Both nutria and muskrats are herbivores that eat similar foods in the same areas. In the long run, the muskrats lose out where the two species overlap; the nutria breed faster and outnumber the muskrats over time. Also, large groups of nutria will sometimes attack a beaver lodge in force, killing the beavers and taking over the lodge as their own.
They also have a dramatic effect on the native flora. In fact, the damage they inflict on the plants of Louisiana is far out of proportion to their food needs. Inexplicably, nutria will chew through the stalk of a plant in order to eat five percent of it, wasting the other ninety-five percent as they move on to the next one.
With their notoriously high numbers in the drainage canals of New Orleans, I expected nutria to be one of the easier species to bag, and then eat. It seemed like a sure thing to bring Jeff along to get what he needed for his article.
There was just one hitch: The editor of the men’s magazine wanted the article to be set in the swamps and bayous rather than in urban New Orleans. My plan had been to follow members of the Jefferson Parish SWAT team for a few nights while they shot nutria from the backs of pickup trucks. Apparently, this didn’t seem atmospheric enough for the magazine (although it sounded like a hoot to me).
So I started looking into where else I could hunt nutria. There happens to be a season of sorts for hunting them. On public land, certain months are designated for shooting and trapping the rodents, and even then there are bag limits. This seems like a strange set of rules for hunting a species that the state of Louisiana considers public enemy number one.
My trip would not be occurring anywhere near the start of the regular season, meaning I could hunt either on a government cull trip (already nixed by the magazine) or on privately owned land. On private land in Louisiana, any landowner can kill (or assign someone else to kill) nutria if the animals are causing any type of damage. Because damage goes along almost automatically with the presence of nutria outside their native range, it’s pretty much open season on nutria on private land year-round.
For a solid month I begged everyone I knew or met or bumped into at the grocery store for introductions to anyone who owned some land anywhere in Louisiana that had nutria on it. Eventually my begging paid off with an introduction to someone with family property outside Shreveport, in the northwest corner of the state. I even found a local professional trapper, one Michael Beran, who was willing to show us the ropes.
; Jeff and I began making preparations for the Great Nutria Expedition of 2011. Jeff had never fired a gun, but had hopes of hunting nutria himself on this trip. To this end, I offered to give him a crash course in safe hunting. We put together a plan for me to pick him up at the train station in Charlottesville, Virginia, teach him basic riflery before dark, and then start the two-day drive to Shreveport in the morning.
I figured that within a couple of days, we’d bag some nutria meat to cook, drive to New Orleans to cook it with a respected chef there, and then go bar-hopping at jazz clubs for the rest of the week until Jeff’s flight home. I’d drive back to Virginia at my own pace and there we’d be. Then, a little over a week before leaving, I got the word that the magazine would be sending a photographer along with us. He would fly into Shreveport to meet up with Jeff and me, and we’d go off hunting the next day.
Now, photography is a wonderful thing. I’m all in favor of it. My experiences in bringing photographers along on hunting expeditions, however, have been mixed at best. The difficulty lies in competing interests. My job as the hunter is to avoid detection by my prey for as long as necessary in order to find and kill it. The photographer’s job is to take pictures, which often involves noisily moving into positions that make for great angles but spook the prey or block shots. This situation doesn’t always work out well.
For two days, Jeff and I had a fine drive across the South in a car full of guns and ammunition. I pulled off at no-name diners in order to acquaint Jeff’s English palate with the finer points of regional barbecue. (By the way, the more run-down and sketchy a southern barbecue joint looks, the better the food will be. You can take that to the bank.) We discovered a common love of ABBA and Adam Ant, and blasted them all across Mississippi. One can be very secure in one’s masculinity when one is armed to the teeth.
Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species Page 10
