Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (14 page)

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.