BON APPETIT: A filet of bighead carp, one of the Asian carp species that has invaded North American waterwaysSWAPAN PHOTOGRAPHY/SHUTTERSTOCK
Charlie and Rover skip back and forth across an aluminum boat idling in a lake connected to the Illinois River near Frederick, Illinois, on a chilly April morning. The father-and-son pair of chocolate labs howls with excitement as Clint Carter, a big, affable guy who runs Carter’s Fish Market in Springfield, reaches overboard to grab part of a gill net he had set the night before. Arm over arm Carter drags in the net, and along with it, big, bloody, flopping carp. Twenty minutes later he’s finished hauling in two 200-yard-long nets and is standing knee deep in a 1,500-pound pile of fish. “If this were over the summer, it would be 10,000 pounds,” he says.
This stretch of the Illinois River—once commercially fished for catfish and a genus of carp-like fish called buffalo—is chock-full of invasive carp originally introduced from Asia. Carter can’t remember it any other way. Asian carp were brought to the southern U.S. decades ago to clean retention ponds, but floods allowed the fish to escape and spread throughout natural waterways, where they quickly dominated their new environs and outcompeted native fish for food. The biggest concern now—aside from getting whacked in the face by the silver carp, which are notorious for their aerial shenanigans—is that they will make it into the ...
