On a cloudy February morning, with temperatures touching the high 40s and a chance of rain, a collection of biologists, scientists, politicians, reporters, security personnel and VIP onlookers gathered in the parking lot at the Pisgah Bay boat ramp near the Hillman Ferry campground on the northern end of Kentucky Lake.
Quietly sporting his political celebrity status and dressed for the event in blue jeans, a flannel shirt and down vest zipped to the neck, Sen. Mitch McConnell headlined the gathering.
Gov. Andy Beshear, in a crisp white shirt and bright-yellow tie, also was in attendance, as was casually dressed Kentucky 1st District U.S. Rep. James Comer. Lyon County Judge-Executive Wade White had a front-row seat. Dr. Jim Reilly, current director of the U.S. Geological Survey and former NASA astronaut whose resumé includes three trips on a space shuttle and five space walks, looked on. Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources Commissioner Rich Storm and several agency department directors, including former fisheries director and current agency “carp czar” Ron Brooks, chatted with the crowd.
A handful of media members, each there by invitation, milled about, along with about two dozen other invited guests and officials.
Surveying the crowd, I concluded that only carp could pull together such a mix of political bedfellows.
Asian carp have invaded much of the upper and middle Mississippi River watershed, including the lower Ohio, Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley. The carp, primarily of the big head and silver variety, are a problem that is not going away but might be controlled. No one knows how many carp are in the lakes. What is known is that they are changing, and possibly damaging, the sport fishery. White has spearheaded local efforts to combat the carp, and Brooks is one of the country’s most knowledgeable carp experts.
We had just witnessed a demonstration of something Paul Wilkes described as the modified unified method of controlling and removing Asian carp. It’s a technique that has been employed in China, where the fish originated, for years but on much smaller bodies of water than Kentucky Lake. Its effectiveness is yet to be determined. Federal funding of $26 million, which McConnell’s office largely helped secure, made it possible. The funding is shared among several states, but McConnell seemed confident that, if more is needed, it will be forthcoming.
“This is really an experiment to remove Asian carp on a level that just far exceeds our current abilities,” said Wilkes, who, before being named acting fisheries director, served as the state’s first aquatic nuisance species coordinator. He knows his way around carp. “The modified unified method is our latest attempt to remove Asian carp.”
The labor-intensive technique is fairly straightforward. Pisgah Bay, where the method of carp collection was demonstrated, could be measured in city blocks. It’s a large embayment.
Asian carp—which are extremely sensitive to sound and often leap from water, occasionally colliding with boats and boaters—are driven inside a netted area. Through sound herding and pulling in the nets, the fish are collected into a relatively small space, then vacuumed into collection nets and removed. The vacuum-like device, which Wilkes referred to as a “fish pump,” is about the size of a combine. It was adapted from a tool used in the Northwest to assist salmon in their upstream migration.
We watched from outside the containment net that reached across the bay as about a dozen workers gradually gathered and collected the fish into smaller, more manageable areas.
“The short and sweet of this process is, essentially, we block off an embayment, and we drive Asian carp to an area where we want them,” Wilkes explained. “Then block the embayment off behind us, drive those carp a little farther, and block it off again until we’ve moved all those fish into a smaller location, where we can try to seine them out en masse.”
Wilkes said sportfish are not as susceptible to sound herding as carp and usually escape the entrapment. Those that don’t are released.
The demonstration was impressive and effective. But whether it can be successfully employed to control unknown numbers of carp prowling a 160,000-acre lake is questionable. There is little doubt it will be helpful, though, especially when coupled with the carp removal efforts of commercial fishermen and other strategies.
“There are a lot of potential directions we can go from here and use this as a tool to see if we can move fish out of here in larger numbers and more efficiently than we currently can,” Wilkes said. “We can also use it potentially to evaluate just how many [carp] are in the lake.”
In a collaborative tone reflected by each official who spoke, including Beshear and Comer, McConnell sounded optimistic.
“We’re hoping that the modified unified method will give us a chance to get rid of them,” he said, adding that efforts are continuing to find and expand commercial markets for Asian carp. “But this is a day to celebrate the beginning of getting rid of this problem. This is a good cooperative effort.”
No one was pretending or suggesting that Asian carp can be eradicated from waters where they have invaded and become established. But they can be controlled.
Reilly, who noted that the USGS is acting as the “research arm” of the project, indicated that a long-term solution might be at the “environmental DNA” level.
“There’s not only containment but control,” the former astronaut said. “But this is not going to be a short-term process.”
Fishermen and businesses whose lifeblood flows from the region’s multimillion-dollar sport fishing industry may have the most to lose to Asian carp.
Wilkes offered encouragement.
“I would tell fishermen to be optimistic,” he concluded. “The fisheries are still outstanding. And we removed more carp last year than we ever have out of these waters, and we’re on pace to shatter that record this year. There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic. Come out here and fish. Don’t let it hold you back.”