Killer Carp Come to Kirksville
My father and I started fishing the Chariton river, which flows right by my hometown of Kirksville, MO, no more than ten years ago. The river was already dirty and channelized, but at that time, if there were any Asian carp, they kept hidden. The fishing could not have been more fun--it was impossible to know what you would catch on any given cast. There were big-name sport fish, like channel and flathead catfish, largemouth and white bass, walleye and white crappie, and all sorts of novelty species like freshwater drum, gar, green sunfish, goldeye and bluegill.
Within the last five years, though, Asian carp have made definite inroads into the Chariton. From a good vantage point, you can see dozens at once cruising along the surface, apparently skimming from a thin layer of floating algae. And while there's no way for me to know if it's really the carps' fault, the fishing is not what it used to be. Now the most common catch of any size is a common carp, the Asian carp's silt-sifting cousin, followed by the shortnose gar, a toothy fish with a slow metabolism, that I speculate could be picking off enough juvenile carp to get by. Other than that, there are mostly just stunted little catfish and drum.
One day I actually managed to snag a surface-cruising silver carp with a bare hook, that somehow lodged in its scales without piercing the meat of its back. It was perhaps a four pound fish, not enormous, but it fought long and hard, mixing the expected vigor of a foul-hooked fish with at least a dozen characteristic silver-carp-style leaps. I finally did bring it close to the shore, though, where my father netted it and laid it down on the rocks, where we observed it for a couple minutes before, believe it or not, releasing it again. Nobody in my family knows how to gut a fish, so we normally just catch and release, and as unhappy as I am about the Asian carp invasion, I guess I don't really have it in me to leave one to lie rotting on the shore. Still, I felt nearly as guilty putting the fish back in the river as I would have felt just killing it. Being able to eat it would have been the ideal alternative.
This site was created by Joey Benevento in Emory University's Domain of One's Own Program as part of an English 212W class with Professor Marc Bousquet.
Within the last five years, though, Asian carp have made definite inroads into the Chariton. From a good vantage point, you can see dozens at once cruising along the surface, apparently skimming from a thin layer of floating algae. And while there's no way for me to know if it's really the carps' fault, the fishing is not what it used to be. Now the most common catch of any size is a common carp, the Asian carp's silt-sifting cousin, followed by the shortnose gar, a toothy fish with a slow metabolism, that I speculate could be picking off enough juvenile carp to get by. Other than that, there are mostly just stunted little catfish and drum.
One day I actually managed to snag a surface-cruising silver carp with a bare hook, that somehow lodged in its scales without piercing the meat of its back. It was perhaps a four pound fish, not enormous, but it fought long and hard, mixing the expected vigor of a foul-hooked fish with at least a dozen characteristic silver-carp-style leaps. I finally did bring it close to the shore, though, where my father netted it and laid it down on the rocks, where we observed it for a couple minutes before, believe it or not, releasing it again. Nobody in my family knows how to gut a fish, so we normally just catch and release, and as unhappy as I am about the Asian carp invasion, I guess I don't really have it in me to leave one to lie rotting on the shore. Still, I felt nearly as guilty putting the fish back in the river as I would have felt just killing it. Being able to eat it would have been the ideal alternative.
This site was created by Joey Benevento in Emory University's Domain of One's Own Program as part of an English 212W class with Professor Marc Bousquet.