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Deep Dive: Andrew Reeves, Author of Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis

• David Evans / Andrew Reeves • Season 1 • Episode 4

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Invasive species are a huge problem around the world. Asian Carp are most well known for flying through the air, striking anyone out for a pleasure cruise on the river, but they have completely changed the ecology and ecosystems they have taken over. They have taken over the Mississippi river and they are headed for the Great Lakes and Canadian Waters!

What are we doing to stop them?

In this episode you will hear from the experts about why Asian Carp were brought to the United States, how they escaped, why they are flourishing and what we are doing to limit their spread.

You will hear from Andrew Reeves, Author of the book "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis", Kevin Irons, Assistant Chief of the Fisheries Division from Illinois Department of Natural Resources, who runs the fishing program to keep asian carp away from the Great Lakes, and from Chuck Shea, US ARMY Corps of Engineers who man the underwater electric barricades keeping fish from the Mississippi river basin out of the Great Lakes.

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David Evans:

Welcome to today's deep dive episode with Andrew Reeves, the author of overrun dispatches from the Asian carp crisis. I'm so excited to share this conversation with you because Andrew is so passionate. He took four years off just to write this book. He knows so much. He's spoken with so many people all across the United States and Canada, for that matter about this issue. And he brings all of those perspectives puts them together in his book, I definitely really highly recommend his book. I thought it was a fantastic read. So sit back, relax, and let's learn a little thing or two from Andrew Reeves about Asian carp and their invasion across the United States. water we doing? And how can we do better? your one stop shop for everything water related from discussing water to use and the organisms that depend on it.

Unknown:

For all the global issues that you

David Evans:

really never knew all had to do with water. I'm your host, David Evans from the aquatic biosphere project. And I just want to ask you something. What are we doing? How can we do better? Alright, I'm so excited today to speak with Andrew Reeves. He is the author of an amazing book, but I can just let him jump in on this. Today we're talking about Asian carp. And, Andrew, can you just give us a bit of an intro to yourself? And what got you interested in Asian carp in the first place? Yeah,

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

well, again, thanks so much for having me. So I spent most of the past decade or so as an environmental writer, I was first introduced to Asian carp through a feature that I wrote for this magazine earlier in the decade. But it was a really fascinating first glimpse into the issue. But one of the things that I realized really early on was just that my focus on the Great Lakes and thinking about Asian carp and what might happen if we get established populations of these invasive fish in the Great Lakes ecosystem, was really just the latest manifestation of this problem that actually spanned decades and the breadth of the continent in a lot of ways. So I started writing the book as part of a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction program, with the University of King's College in Halifax, and then really just dove into the research travel. And all of the work that I ended up putting into it, which was a lot more logistically challenging, I think, because there were about a dozen states or so that I ended up having to travel to all the way up and down the Mississippi River in order to really be able to capture different elements of the story that that really just oak kept opening up, the more, the more I explored the issue.

David Evans:

Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. So I've been introduced Asian carp. It's been on my radar for quite a while now. But it never really was an issue that really jumped to the forefront of my mind. And I guess it, it was an issue that I was aware of, but it was never something that I was really concerned about, because it wasn't viscerally in my face or anything. I mean, I stumbled on a video actually on YouTube of Asian carp exploding out of a river as boats were driving by, and I couldn't believe my eyes of what I was seeing. And that's when I knew I needed to find out more. And so this all led me to actually finding your book. So I read the Euro Canadian author, and you travel across the states to understand the full story when it came to Asian carp. And I was I was hooked. So you're the author of the book overrun dispatches from the Asian carp crisis. So I guess, can you tell us about the inspiration behind writing this book, why choose book as the medium that you chose? And what Told you it was the right time for you to write this book?

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

So it probably would have been maybe 2013 or so when I first became aware of Asian carp. And the first thing that I noticed when I looked around was that there were an awful lot of news stories online and on the six o'clock news. The primary focus of it often just seem to be, again, these these sort of comical videos of fish jumping out of the water we don't really have a lot of, or any that I know of freshwater fish in North America that have that kind of jumping fight or flight response, which makes them unique. But it also makes them this really visceral, no indicator that something is wrong with our ecosystems when a boat traveling down a river, which is a pretty, you know, banal thing all of a sudden just result in hundreds and hundreds, which ends up being 1000s of pounds of fish flying through the air at 3040 kilometers an hour. And these are our big fish too. And a lot of cases, most of them are we seen the videos are usually between like 20 and 30 pounds, but you have a, it sounds like a high school math equation problem, if you have, if you have a 30 pound fish flying at you 40 miles per hour is is like how badly will your nose be broken? And, and I was seeing a lot of these these stories. And then the more I looked into it, the more I realized that they were all really just sort of touching the surface and a lot of ways, and that there was actually just this tremendous history dating back to, you know, what I thought essentially was just going to be the early 1960s. But then I realized that so much of the reason why these fish came, actually had far more to do with the Second World War and you know, potent decennial poisons that we were using to be able to kill aquatic weeds and insects. And so this fascinating journey went from, there's this really strange invasive fish that's threatening the Great Lakes, all the way up to me needing to understand concepts like how the glaciers formed the Great Lakes, or how DDT came to notoriety, helping, you know, the Allied army when the Second World War, all the way up to reaganomics in the 1980s. And I had a really hard time almost explaining the book to people when they would say, so you're writing this book about a fish, I guess. Yeah. But also, these fish in this really strange way, are really just they're telling us these stories about ourselves. My, my very highfalutin joke was always was like, No, no, the fish are actually just this mirror with which we can view ourselves and the decisions that we make. But at the end of the day, it ended up being a story about our reaction in many ways to these invasive fish and and what that says about how we have treated our ecosystems and our cities and how we grow our food, and all of the impacts that this has had on on our landscapes, which has really created this perfect environment for this invasive species and many others to thrive in ways that we didn't think that maybe they could.

David Evans:

Yeah, I mean, it all connects at some level, and your book goes through a lot of it connecting the world wars, the formation of this continent, and, and how that is all really impacted, and allowed this problem to escalate. I'm fascinated with the history of why these fish were brought here in the first place, how most of the intentions of bringing them here were good, and they were being put to work, then things just spiraled out of control. So can you just describe a bit about the beginning of this problem?

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

Yeah, absolutely. And as I've gone to talk to different groups, and to take it, you know, the book on tour, back in 2019, when it was released, very quickly, for me, I realized that one of the things that everyone wanted to talk about was, you know, can we just eat them and and you know, we can talk about that later if you'd like. But for me, that was always one of the things that I think was a little less fascinating than just this incredibly complex history of how and why they got here. So I really tailored a lot of my presentations to different people that I spoke with, on this this store. And it goes basically something like this, that in the early 1960s American resource managers that people who ran hydroelectric facilities, people who ran golf courses, or Eric Yuan, who had irrigation canals for citrus groves in Florida, or California, they all had this very common problem. And it was with aquatic weeds that were had been brought over mostly in the 19th century for like horticulture, and had basically exploded in numbers in density in irrigation canals, golf course ponds, the cooling tanks of hydroelectric reservoirs. And in a nutshell, they had clogged these spaces up, so much so that resource managers needed to find a way to be able to keep those numbers in control. And so they turned, you know, through, you know, better living through chemistry in the 1950s and early 1960s towards science and the science at the time was really suggesting that the solution to this problem was chemical pesticides in different ways. And so what I ended up finding was that a big part of the reason Why people a brace This was because it was very effective. But we didn't have at least in short increments of time. But we didn't really have a very clear understanding of the ways in which these chemical pesticides were impacting the environment and in various species in humans as well, until Rachel Carson came along and published Silent Spring first serialized in the New Yorker, and then this book format, which really changed our understanding of how you know, the ways that we behave, and the way that we treat our you know, resources in the world around us how they, you know, full circle come back and affect us and every other species we share this these bases with. And initially, I didn't fully appreciate the connection between Asian carp and something like silence breeding until I found myself sitting in a fish processing facility or fish rearing facility in Arkansas. And someone who I least suspected was going to make this parallel to, you know, this pioneer in the environmental field suggested, well, actually, we brought over grass carp anyway, because of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. And I was, I remember thinking, as I wrote in the bug was like, Okay, very clearly, this is sort of like a green shroud that this industry is now cloaking itself in to be able to, you know, minimize the impact that they had, because of how devastating Asian carp are now to these ecosystems. But in a nutshell, he was right, that after Carson wrote Silent Spring, this idea came out that we should learn from nature and that nature had found a biological solution to most of the problems that we faced. And so instead of chemical pesticides, at this time, when people were thinking about her book, there was a recommendation from a man who worked for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, who came and spoke with some resource managers in the United States in the southern states, who were thinking about this most most heavily and said, so there's a fish that is been cultured in China in its native range. It's called grass carp. And it's been cultured there for 1000s and 1000s. of years. But it has such an appetite for aquatic weeds, that this seems like it's actually the perfect kind of solution that Rachel Carson was discussing. It is a biological and natural alternative to spraying pesticides. And this man who is working for the UN, did warn his his American colleagues to say before, you simply bring this fish over and release it into natural waterways, though, spend some time on this, think about it, try and evaluate the impact that it might have in natural waterways, if it is able to basically escaped these institutions, we would keep them in and make it into local open waterways. Unfortunately, the Americans spent about a month thinking about this and determined that in that month that the risks were minimal, you know, it was much warmer in Arkansas than it was in northern China in their native range. So there was really in their mind, no problem in bringing these fish over. And so they did. The early challenge with grass carp in particular, which eats aquatic plants was whether they would be able to cultivate and grow more of them in lab. And they did. And then between the early 1960s and the early 1970s, the fish grew in such huge numbers and in such popularity that on their own by having access to local waterways, and with our help in transporting them and trucks, we proceeded to move these fish from their central point in Arkansas, to I think at the top bite within a decade to 32 of the 48 states in the United States. All the way up the Mississippi River system was like North and South was like but also to anywhere where there were, as I mentioned earlier, golf course pawns in need of control, you know, citrus groves anywhere where people were looking to control aquatic weeds, which was most states at around this time. And so this was how we ended up spreading these fish over the 1960s. But it was early in the 1970s that the success or so we defined it with grass carp led to the introduction of two very closely related species in silver and big kids who were brought over to be able to help catfish farmers in order to be able to help control algal blooms that were exploding and catfish ponds. But it didn't work out in catfish ponds, and then we thought, hey, maybe we can use these fish to be able to help clean up the sewage lagoons. With wastewater treatment plants. I'm not sure how much time we want to spend talking about and

David Evans:

this is fascinating because I read that book and I couldn't believe it.

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

Yeah, it's so I mean, again, the abbreviated version is that the the Clean Water Act I merged in the early 1970s. It was 1972 in the United States, which basically said this process So we have been doing for forever, of basically straining out the solids from our raw sewage and dumping the rest of it into local waterways was is incredibly stupid as it sounds. So the place this the system's telling no small counties with their small wastewater treatment plants. Hey, listen, you can't keep just dumping raw waste into your local rivers you need to clean it up. But small, small county governments they don't have large tax bases and wastewater treatment plants then, as now are expensive, you know, technical operations. But one of the things that was suggested to them by none other than the Environmental Protection Agency of all places, was that based on the success of grass carp, but there was silver and bighead who had also been cultured in their native range in China, who are these incredible filter feeders that will swim through the water column, and just suck up huge amounts of organic material, which was exactly the same problem that these catfish farmers had with excess plant matter in the water body, which was leading to algal blooms, which was depriving the water of oxygen, which was killing the catfish. Well, someone had the same sort of idea with the the, you know, the wastewater plants and the sewage plants, could we stock these retention ponds with silver and big head, they would swim around, they would eat up all of the organic matter that was breaking down the like the human sewage. And in the process, they would grow large, and the water would be then made clean enough and that you can be released into local waterways without killing species that were growing inside. Someone then had the idea that if you could sell the fish that you grow in these wastewater ponds, if you could sell those fish for human consumption, small counties could actually make a profit on these finish, raised on nothing but human waste. Though, I spoke with the man who led this, this research he actually received, I think, was about 17, or $18,000, from the federal government in Washington, to be able to run it to run a study to say, hey, how healthy would fish raised on human poop be? And it turns out after he ran all these studies that yes, they could clean the water in these ponds to standards that met the EPA guidelines for wastewater effluent, you could then eat these fish, they were, despite being filter feeders were actually surprisingly healthy. They were low in mercury and other contaminants. So for this man, it was basically a win win. But the reason why that didn't happen, aside from the fact that there wasn't much interesting eating fish that were raised on on human poop. Well, plus the fact that it was around that same time in the early 1980s, that there was this sea change in Washington, after Ronald Reagan was elected to basically do away with environmental regulation, cut the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. And you can just imagine a, you know, bureaucrat in Washington looking at their budget and saying, I'm sorry, we're spending $20,000, to be able to determine whether fish reared on human sewage can help clean up wastewater ponds. Like why would we do that? And so they they slashed the budget. So when the man who was leading this for an Arkansas wrote to the EPA to say, so here's your report, these fish are amazing. They can do everything we want. There's an opportunity for these these county governments to turn a profit. What do you think he never heard back? And when he called Washington to say, Hey, did you get my report that I sent along, they basically said thank you for your service. But we're not interested in pursuing any more research with these fish. So I spoke with again, this man, Scott Henderson, who led this work, and he told me that, you know, they very responsibly, shut down the project and destroyed all of the fish that they were using. But what he suspects and what I suspect is true as well, is that there were in that time in Arkansas, and many people who were producing fish who were growing them in facilities like fish farms, because there was such hype about the potential to use silver bighead carp, in wastewater treatment, that there were these entrepreneurs essentially, who thought if this, if this is right, everyone is going to want these fish, they've got to buy them from somewhere, if we get ahead of this, they can buy them from us. But when the word came down from Washington that there was no longer any interest in using these fish. Most of them suddenly had this like sunk cost of working with these fish, that we're now just going to be a drain on their resources for very little return value. And so, this suspicion which I have not was not able to find written down anywhere because people tend not to write down the illegal things that they do is that the easiest way to get rid of these fish was simply to open up your sluice gates and just let the fish run into local waterways where they were no longer your problem. What I did find was documents from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission reporting the species that local anglers had were reporting at local docks. And you could trace the numbers in the early 1980s. And you basically so look no references to any Asian carp species. And then slowly, you could trace the years when these fish were introduced. And then over many years, you saw the numbers of reported cases increase every single year, as more of these fish that were likely released from these hatcheries spread out and found the suitable conditions to spine and from there, with open access to the Mississippi River, which is basically the superhighway from Minnesota all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, they were able to spread with very little standing in their way. And here we are.

David Evans:

And here we are. At some wild to It's wild to think back to what a PR nightmare it would have been to try to sell these fish reared on human waste to the American public, and trace that back to where we are now but it doesn't account for grass carp too. And there's there's so many different factors to this story and and, and how it's all led to where we are today. It's wild.

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

Well, what I'll what I'll mention is that very, very seldom do we end up also talking about the fact that grass carp are still actually used, raised and sold to many states throughout the United States. So silver, silver and big head and a fourth cousin of theirs the black carp. They are all currently blacklisted by US federal regulation that you cannot raise these fish or move them intentionally or even unknowingly across state borders. However, in the early 1980s, we still realize that there was a value in using grass carp they are amazing at cleaning up aquatic weeds. So these producers in the USF started working over the 80s and into the 90s. With US Fish and Wildlife Service and the federal government to say there's got to be a way that we can create a program so that we can create sterile grass carp, unable to reproduce, so that we can still use them for the purposes of cleaning these citrus groves, these golf course ponds, and anyone else who needed to have spaces cleared. And so they developed over, you know, the 80s and into the 90s, a program to be able to raise sterile grass carp, which are permissible to ship through most states in the United States currently. And so that's why in relation to the Great Lakes, one of the first questions that people ask if we ever find grass carp in any of the Great Lakes is are they sterile? And this is tied into the fact that there is still this process to sell, you know, sterile fish that were bred in hatchery. And so that's always the first question we want to know. Because that tells us an awful lot about whether they were finding a way to be able to reproduce naturally in Great Lakes, tributary streams and rivers, or whether this is a fish that was likely raised in Arkansas, and shipped to Ohio, for example, where it then escaped whatever facility was in and made its way into the Lake Erie, for example. No, it does tell us an awful lot. But I mean, that's that's a whole other angle. So one of the places that I visited in Arkansas, I was actually present when one of the Fish and Wildlife regulators came and did their weekly inspection as they took, like a representative sample of 100 fish in order to be able to fascinating,

David Evans:

yeah, that the triploid diploid test, right?

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

Yeah. So this was this was the way that they were able to use this machine that kind of looked like like a little small microwave oven. And there's this way to be able to basically like look at their, like red blood cells and be able to tell with, you know, reasonable certainty based on the shape of their blood cell, whether this fish has two chromosomes and is capable of reproducing or whether it's a triple A fish and has three chromosomes, which tends to disrupt their ability to reproduce. And so the way that you were able to do that, which I was able to see with, you know, the process and how it unfold is basically just, you know, you put the eggs under extreme pressure, and that ends up warping their cellular structure and creates this third chromosome, it allows them to survive, but it does significantly reduce their their ability to reproduce. And so this is now a process that's used for grass carp that shipped right around the country. I mean, to give you some idea of how often or how powerful these fish are at performing this task. One of the men I spoke with a US Fish and Wildlife Service in Missouri, who was One of the key phases and combating Asian carp, he has a private fishing pond on his property, which he stocks with sterile grass carp. Because even though even the people who spend their working lives trying to eradicate or control these species recognize that at least for grass carp, that they might not have been the, you know, the uniform mistake that we might think the others were simply because in their sterile form, they are highly effective at doing exactly what we need them to do, and are useful alternative to chemical pesticides. So that was some of the early chapters in the book really explored this idea of, you know, is this, you know, was this bringing these fish over, like an example of fulfilling Carson's greatest desires? Or are we living out her worst nightmare when it comes to Asian carp? And it's not really for me to answer, but I think it was Asian carp. In many respects, especially grass carp can really sort of problematize our thinking about what it means to make these kinds of interventions in nature, and how black and white some of these issues can be. Exactly. One thing that really struck me when I was reading the book was actually had to put it down at some points and, and head back to YouTube to double check what I was actually reading, because I couldn't believe the size that you described, that these fish would get to these fish are massive. In some cases, some of these big head and silver carp get to such enormous sizes. Now, I would encourage all listeners to just take a second put this on pause, and just search Asian carp in on YouTube. And it will actually just blow your mind. Some of my initial thoughts were that Yeah, it looks kind of cool. But the more I watched it, the more scary it became to me of this problem is completely out of control, it seems, and people do get hurt because of these fish. Do you think that the invasion of Asian carp, do you think it's being taken as seriously as it should be? strangely enough, when it comes to the Great Lakes and Asian carp as well, they're they do become this bipartisan issue in a lot of ways. There aren't really a lot of defenders of Asian carp. And so there's not really a lobby that saying just like just leave the fish alone, they're they're not causing any trouble. Like other than the fact that we've acknowledged as we just discussed that there is a value to still using sterile grass carp in a number of ways. We have invested a huge amount of money. I mean, one of the and one of the key things that first got me into this story, the first research trip that I took for this book, I was driving from Toronto, where I live down to Cleveland, Ohio, in January. So I was worried about snowstorms when the Army Corps of Engineers was holding, like a big public event, in order to be able to talk about a big report at the time that they had just released. arguing that one of the options on the table for stopping Asian carp from reaching the Great Lakes was the allocation of between 18 and $25 billion in order to be able to hydrologically separate the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River. And so like we're talking about huge, huge sums of money, the project was going to take 25 years they anticipated to complete. And just so everyone is aware, we're talking about fundamentally restructuring the hydrology of the continent in order to be able to stop this fish. And I remember when I was driving to Cleveland, I was a little on the fence about whether I was going to write this book, I didn't know if I had the time or the means to really do it justice. But I thought I'm going to go to this event I'm going to see. And if I show up at the Cleveland Public Library, their big downtown branch, and there's like five people in the room, I might not have written the book because I might have taken that as like a really bad sign that people actually cared less. When we got to Cleveland, it was like a snowy night. It was a six o'clock start time or so for this event. And by six o'clock, it was effectively standing remotely. And when we got a tour and it was taking place. And so I would wager that there was between like 75 and 100 or more people who had come up the local Congresswoman marcy kaptur was also there in order to be able to talk to members from the Army Corps of Engineers, and others who had come to be able to talk to the group. And I remember sitting in the wings looking at this crowd thinking what would have to happen in Toronto, for 100 plus people to come out to a library at dinner time during a snowstorm in order to be able to hear a presentation from government bureaucrats about a fish and the hands like I couldn't fit anything that would happen here that would draw that kind of numbers. And so I thought, okay, there's something here and then that was just reinforced, the more I I've heard people who basically use this as an opportunity to just like give the Army Corps hell about what was going on, and their lack of action or so they thought on moving forward with these plans. And I realized, okay, there is there's a deep well of passion here that I really hadn't anticipated. And since then, while the report of the Army Corps in their proposal didn't move ahead, we are still debating projects that are costing hundreds of millions of dollars in order to be able to find ways to put in permanent barriers and you know, acoustic barriers, visual like audio visual barriers, different ways of being able to deter the fish that strengthen the existing electric fence, which has already been erected in Chicago to help try and keep these fish from reaching the Great Lakes. So we're, strangely enough, this is one of those issues where when we need to find the money in both in Canada and in the United States, although to a much greater extent than the United States, we have been able to find the money to challenge here, which is really the focus of the early part of the book, is that the Great Lakes, because they are being threatened by Asian carp. And because Asian carp aren't actually there, and established numbers yet, have basically become the focal point for any and all discussions about Asian carp in Canada and the United States. And the challenge I had was that when I visited the US south into Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, especially, and talked with people there about their experience with the problem, I was hearing the same kinds of stories of frustration from members of the public was like I was hearing the same frustrations from academic researchers or, you know, fisheries biologists, people who spend their lives working on this issue, who are saying, if we had an eighth of the money, that is being funneled towards the Great Lakes to protect them to be able to deal with our existing Asian carp problem, we would be able to do so much good. And the argument that I've heard from people in the south was it, these are interconnected systems, if you do everything possible to keep them from making it into the Great Lakes, but you don't do anything to stop or halt or minimize their ability to reproduce and spread, which is taking place in the USS they will there will simply be more of these fish generating themselves generation after generation in the USF and using their access to open waterways to continue moving north, as they did in the 70s 80s and 90s. We know that they'll do that fish swim, it's what they do. And so it seems really silly, you know, I was hearing a lot of ways to say no, no, we're really going to silo our approach to this not only the approach, but also the money that's on the table. And so I this, the focus of the chapters that I wrote based in Louisiana, in particular, was one of general frustration at this feeling that we could be doing so much to protect local fisheries in Louisiana or local jobs, local livelihoods there, if only we were able to take it as seriously here, as we do in the Great Lakes region. So I would say that we are taking the issue very seriously in the Great Lakes. But there are many other parts of the United States where Asian carp have been established and been incredibly disruptive for years and years and years, decades and decades, where they are left crying out for a shred of money to be able to conduct the kind of baseline research that is needed in the fisheries, to be able to do any of the current studies to be able to determine the level of impact that they've had, which is why we've had to spend so much time in the USL relying on anecdotes from commercial fishermen about what they see or what they don't see, to really get a sense of the impact that these fish are having. Because we're not allocating the money to be able to determine it empirically. And it's it's a shame that a lot of ways.

David Evans:

Some of the passages you wrote in that section detailing the impacts down there on all aspects of society. They're truly heartbreaking. And it seems that there's such a disparity between trying to mitigate future actions versus deal with the problem as a whole. It seems to be a big disparity that you need to point out in the first few chapters there. In early days when I was talking about the book with with people here in Ontario, is a big big cottage industry here on on the Great Lakes and

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

Georgia may especially where you have multimillion dollar condos you have cottagers who are forming cottagers associations to be able to lobby provincial and federal governments about things like water levels, but also about things like invasive species. And I remember hearing these stories about how fearful people were that if Asian carp became established in the Great Lakes to challenges that it would pose to everything from, you know, wetlands around their cottages. to, you know, their access, if it was a cottages on an island, for example, and you had to take a boat there, or you're going to risk a concussion or a broken nose in order to be able to get to the family cottage, which is only accessible by boat. And these are real, real concerns they were having. But in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, you should talk to people in Louisiana and hear their stories, when they have to tell me the ways that they've had to change their their social and their cultural habits, simply because these fish are there. And that's the concern that they have. So I met many, many people who would talk to me again and again about how well we used to, you know, go recreational boating, we used to be able to make it to the cottage we used to enjoy like waterskiing. And again, you know, not hugely important things in the grand scheme of things. But this was for many people, boating, especially it was a way of life and a lot of states. And to know that there is now this huge new elevated risk. I was wanting to talk to the people in Ontario, anytime someone would would raise those legitimate concerns to me to say, Well, yeah, that's that's the experience of many, many, many people in the southern United States. But we want their help to help us to have the avoid that same fate. But what are we doing for them? What what help are we providing them so that this doesn't have to continue to be their new way of life that they can go back to enjoying what you are now realizing is at risk for you. And those were some of the things that I really wanted to try and highlight in the book because I myself had come at it initially, from a Great Lakes perspective before I realized that yeah, this is just one part of this larger geographic story. And we ignore the other part of it at our peril. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, it, it seems, don't worry about them, they're already dealing with it, but just worry about me, I don't want to have to be like them, that kind of almost childish attitude towards it. Obviously a selfish attitude in the sense that we're not dealing with it as a continent. But it's such a huge geographic issue that it causes so many different impacts. Of course, it's going to be please don't let this happen to me kind of attitude that take hold. And the interesting thing was I completely understood people's concerns here that the challenge was always just Yeah, you're, you're looking to protect something and you need the help of people who didn't enjoy that same level of protection that you're now demanding. So yes, they should help you. But also, what are we prepared to do, you know, as a continent, in many ways, was given the, you know, the International component of this piece, to be able to help other people who are struggling under the weight of these fish and the impact that they're having on everything from, you know, like culture and recreation, all the way up to two livelihoods. I mean, an interesting new dimension to Asian carp in the USL with is the fact that for a very long time, we thought that these fish were not capable of surviving in particularly salty or brackish waters. Right? We've discovered that there's a greater level of adaptability there than we ever imagined possible, in that we have now actually identified these fish surviving and thriving in a lot of ways in incredibly brackish water. leading some to it in his speculations about whether or not given enough time and new avenue a new vector for these fish to be able to spread would actually just be the Gulf of Mexico, which raises its own whole new set of challenges for

David Evans:

Oh my God,

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

to make it to the Gulf of Mexico. Well, we don't think they'd be able to thrive in the same kind of numbers that they can in, you know, calm or you know, freshwater rivers. But at the same time in Lake Pontchartrain, just north of Louisiana for people who know their geography. It's a very very brackish lake. But we have now actually seen we know where the fish though Asian carp entered through the monetary spillway, which is spilling freshwater from the Mississippi River into Lake Pontchartrain. We have now found Asian carp on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, and the only way for them to have gotten there would have been through from the bonnet carre spillway through this salt water over to other freshwater tributaries. So they're now using these salt water bodies as a way to almost hop from one freshwater source to another. And we never thought that this was possible. So there's this level of adaptability with these and many other invasive species that is often actually what makes them so dangerous in the first place is because they have these that's how they've been able to thrive is by being flexible and adaptable in a lot of ways. So it's perhaps surprising that they continue to surprise us. That leads me to my next question of what really led to these carp doing so well in so many different environments across the United States. I'm wondering if you can just touch on for the listeners who maybe have seen some of the videos, but they truly don't understand the level that these carp have taken over some of these waterways. What are the impacts that we're really seeing to some of these areas?

Unknown:

Yeah, for sure. So,

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

we've talked an awful lot about their size, but just to give people some context for this routinely, most of the you know, silver bighead carp and big I do tend to be a little bit larger than silver carp. They're usually most of the ones you would find in the Illinois River now especially or other tributaries like the Missouri River, or the Ohio River, or even parts of the Mississippi still are usually between like 20 to 30 pounds, they will routinely get up to 4550 for some of the older 4550 pounds for some of the older fish. But there have been recorded cases, these are rare, they're outliers of Asian carp, such as silver and grass and big head reaching over 100 pounds. That's crazy. When you raise it, you see people lifting fish the size, I mean, when I saw I spent some time with some commercial fishermen on the Illinois River, in the middle of that state. And I ended up being presented a fish that was probably about 4550 pounds. And, you know, a 50 pound fish, especially like, especially one that is like covered in slime and scales, oh my gosh, blood and feces was like, it's not an easy thing to hold. And so again, especially when you're in a boat, so I remember when we pulled up one of the nets that we were using, and there's this giant big head carp, now lands in the bottom of the boat, and I'm invited to pick it up. And so I, I grabbed it under the gills, but very quickly realized that for balance purposes, but also just for lifting that I need to like, bend my knees like I'm exercising, lifting kettlebells or something, I grab it underneath its gills and I'm lifting it. But it was I then had to throw it over into another part of the boat. And just the process of getting this like writhing mass of muscle. over top of this like divider that we had had in the jungle, we were using over to the divider to the other side took most of my strength in that moment because of how big these fish were. Most of the fish that you see jumping are silver carp, and to just explain it's just a fight or flight mechanism. They hear boat rotor noises and they're terrified but because they don't tend to be as big as big head carp, rather than try and like dive deep their survival mechanism is to leap into the air figuring that like, well if the danger is in the water, I can be saved by temporarily jumping out of the water. So that's that's why they do that as well. So what we saw after these fish were led into open waterways in Arkansas was that their spread was was pretty dramatic. First day, and in many cases, they headed south towards the Gulf of Mexico. But then from there, they headed north and occasionally they found tributary big tributary rivers like the Ohio or the Missouri and began to branch off heading east and west a little bit. But that's actually been something in the past decade or more, that they started heading east west rather than north south. But then they continued heading north. And the other challenge is that with grass carp because they're eating aquatic weeds, the concern was always that if they ran out of the you know the abundance of aquatic weeds that they need. And these are fish that can eat about 20% of their body weight each day, which is a lot of organic matter when you're like a 50 pound fish. Yeah, what you were encountering was the fear that they were going to then begin just destroying wetlands in their their search for food. There were a few cases from the literature that I discovered where when these fish were overstocked early on in ponds, that when they ran out of food, they got so desperate that there were these images of grass carp literally jumping out of the water to grab at weeds that were growing along the riverbank. And so all my jumping out to grab onto those in order to be able to haul plants into the river because they were hungry. So the fear was always if they run out of the plant matter that they can eat that we don't care about, are they going to turn their attention to wetlands. And my my long running joke has always been that, you know, humans don't need competition for destroying wetlands, we do a really good job of that ourselves. And so, like the ones that we have left are like especially important for us to hold on to. So that was the fear with with grass carp. And what we saw with silver and big head is again, because they are filter feeders that are but they're also incredibly adaptable. So the fear was not that they were going to eat native species so much as it is that they were going to eat native fishes lunch and so suddenly by eat gobbling up huge amounts of organic matter that many fish at various stages in their life rely on for survival, that they weren't going to have the food that they needed. And so what we saw over the 80s and into the 90s, in the early 2000s, was that the the biomass of silver and big head and grass carp was getting so large that when researchers were testing various sections of the Mississippi River system to get a sense of, you know, what the what was living there, and in what volume, they found that upwards of about 95 or so percent of the total biomass of certain sections of the Mississippi River was Asian carp. You were also finding these instances where the only fish they found in certain surveys they were doing that grew over 12 inches long were bighead and silver carp.

David Evans:

That's crazy. That's so such a huge difference. If they weren't even there, like that's, yeah, that's, I'm sorry, I just can't get past this fat. Well, and this was

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

this was one of the first things that really began to percolate into the mainstream news about just how wrong our ecosystems had become, and how total the takeover was by these fish. When we were able to point to research saying like, well, we're actually at a stage now where 95% of all living matter, in certain stretches of the river is this one invasive species of fish family. And so what were we going to do about it, but before we really started thinking about what we're going to do about it, the fish work done moving. And so they have now continued that sort of like, merciless spread up the Mississippi River, basically, as far as they can travel, when you hit the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, St. Paul, you find the St. Anthony lock and dam on the Mississippi River, which is, you know, the one of the largest locks in that part of the country, and was too high for the fish to be able to get past. So we have not found them further north there. But basically, when they found that boundary, they just spread to smaller rivers, some of those smaller rivers we're seeing, and they now like the Missouri and the Ohio, but the crucial one is regards to the Great Lakes was that they also found this connection to the Illinois River. And from there, they have spread up the Illinois River. And we're through, you know, there's a whole chapter on the way in which we have manufactured the, you know, waterway system in Chicago. Basically, there exactly didn't used to be a connection between the Illinois River and the Chicago River. But there, there is now. And because of the that connection, that human made connection, it was theoretically impossible for these fish to be able to just keep going through Chicago, and into the Great Lakes. And it was only when we began to see the numbers creeping further and further towards Chicago, that we started thinking, what can we do to be able to help them and so the phone some of the first major pieces of infrastructure that we built, were in the early 2000s. I mean, fascinatingly enough, the first electric barrier that they erected in Chicago, was not actually to stop Asian carp from making it into the Great Lakes, it was to stop another invasive fish round goby from taking it from a wave, again, into the Mississippi River system. But they were too late in getting the barrier erected to stop Gobi. So there's now Gobi, all over the continent. But in addition to that, it was like then they pivoted to say, Well, actually, we're still going to build this because it will be really useful in stopping Asian carp. And so that has become our biggest line of defense. And part of the reason why I spent some time with those commercial fishers is that if we want to, we want to really drill down to the two major things that we have done to stop Asian carp from making it into the Great Lakes, it has been to build those barriers, and to pay a handful of commercial fishermen, a few $1,000 every week, or every two weeks to go out and fish the populations down in certain stretches of the Illinois River, and then give those fish that they catch to a local producer who turns them into fertilizer. That's it. That's it. We've we've spent, we have a few other major projects on the go that we can discuss. But in a nutshell, those are the two things that we really have in place that are the barrier defense between Asian carp and the Great Lakes. The good news is that in terms of two things we can do, they're working very well in tandem. So we haven't actually seen the advance of these fish much beyond the, you know, the middle part of the state of Illinois, simply because, you know, we have also done some terrifically damaging things to those waterways that have polluted them. Yeah, point where many fish species actually find it very difficult to survive there. So there is some speculation that the fish haven't really tried to colonize the Chicago River. The Because who would want to because it's a very polluted industrial River at this stage. But between the pollutants in the river and the fishermen who are hauling out millions and millions of pounds of fish it was like, and the barriers, the electric barriers, they're actually doing a pretty good job of keeping them from advancing.

David Evans:

So I have to ask this question are Asian carp in Canada yet.

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

So we have found them in small numbers in different parts of the Great Lakes system. So mostly in Ontario, we'd be talking about and in this case, we have found a few grass carp in like Sandusky Bay, for example, in Lake Erie, we found them one offs and a few tributary rivers of Lake Ontario, one of the biggest finds we found recently was near the just south of Toronto, there's the Toronto islands, which is basically a like a big tourist area. But it's also just this beautiful green space, south of the city that's pretty beloved by the city. But there's a marina there. And some researchers found five, six years ago now I want to say that the eight to maybe a dozen max of Asian carp that were swimming, you know, as casually as a fish and swim just like in and around these boats in the Marina. And it led to this just tremendous response, both from the provincial government, the federal government, I even think at the time, you know, pre COVID that some of our federal income, the Federal can state counterparts are in the United States, accent teams up with their boats to be able to just like, flood the area with boats and researchers desperately trying to see like, okay, we found a 910 of them. Are there more of them here. And interestingly enough, none of the other research are there. The other search efforts turned up more Asian carp, which was, you know, admittedly good news. But in the back of many biologist minds who I spoke with is this thought were, the odds of their only being eight are probably pretty, probably pretty slim. And despite our best efforts, these are very smart fish, they can be very difficult to find, if they don't want to be found, that part of Lake Ontario was also deep enough that the fish likely could have just dove beyond the capabilities of our nets or the electrofishing capabilities. So there's a lot of there were a lot of factors at play, to explain away Why we might not have been able to find more. To this day, we have not been able to say definitively that there has been an established population here, all we've been able to find, are these one offs. Can we explain where they came from? Unfortunately, not. But we do know that they have been present here. And we know from other studies that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and others have done that in the event that they do establish problems themselves in the Great Lakes, that they have the water quality, the water temperature, they have the tributary streams that they need, which are the appropriate length and the appropriate flow in order to ensure their survival. So everything they would need, they could find, especially in Lake Erie, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, less so for Lake Ontario because it's protected by some of the hydroelectric dams near Niagara Falls, and Lake Superior as being like the headwaters of most of this because it is so vast and so cold, that we really don't suspect that that would be the primary place where Asian Asian carp would congregate, but low level places in and around Green Bay, Sandusky Bay and around Chicago, calmer, shallower, warmer parts of the Great Lakes. And all of the tributary rivers and streams would provide them with everything they need to survive.

David Evans:

Yeah, so the fear would be that they would just brilla freight just as they have throughout majority of the Mississippi River Basin.

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

And some people have cautioned, you know, like me and others in places I've read that it is tricky to be able to compare a lake system with river system that they behave in very different ways, obviously. But there are, again, most of the most of the earliest research that federal researchers in Canada did our contribution and a lot of cases to some of the Great Lakes, Asian carp research was in trying to determine, okay, if they make it here, would they find the rivers that they need? Are they long enough? Do they move quickly enough? Or are they too fast? What about the water quality? What about water temperature, and all of those early studies, every single one of them has reinforced our worst fears, which is that they would find everything they need to be able to thrive, whether it would be to the same extent that they could in the Mississippi, where they became such a high percentage of the bottom biomass that we don't know. But we're actively working out to make sure that we never have to find out. Yeah. So in your mind, what is the future for Asian carp in North America? Well, I mean, it's interesting. I mentioned at the beginning that a lot of people always wanted to talk about eating them. And so I spent a few minutes talking about this, because there was, there was a story in usa today that someone alerted me to on Twitter a couple of days ago to say, Well, you know, here's another article about Illinois Natural History survey, like leading some of this work, to be able to get more people to to consume these fish. But in a nutshell, and again, this was a whole chapter in the book. The fish are incredibly bony, to the point where, when I talked to restaurant tours, who had been serving a filet of bighead carp, in the restaurant, they were often telling me that the fish was so difficult to process to prepare for cooking, that if they were going to make any money on serving bighead carp, for example, they would have to charge $60 us at a minimum in order to be able to make even the slimmest of profits on it. And the reality is there's enough stigma attached to eating what is effectively like a pretty bland white fish that no one in the right mind was going to pay that. So there's the high end approach to eating these fish. But then some people have said, No, no, no, we have to go in the other direction. And so there are other people who are actively working to create the processing capacity to de bone these fish, and then basically turn them into meals that you would then serve in institutions. And it's a bit of a darker view of what we could do with these fish. But some people have suggested that there are, you know, the prison system in the United States is very extensive and very complex are a lot of mouths to feed in US prison systems and in. But then some people have also said, well, also hospitals, but also, again, pre COVID people and suggested cruise ships, there were a lot of a lot of places where you would have huge numbers of people that you would need to feed. And so the reality is that these fish are very good to eat. They are very good for you in terms of being high in the right kinds of like, you know, omega fatty acids, but they also take to flavor pretty well on their own. They don't really taste like anything. But if you flavor them in different ways a day, they can taste good. So personally, I've had them I've eaten them smoked, which I didn't really like because they just taste like smoke they because they just absorb, absorb whatever you flavor them.

Unknown:

Yeah, but I've also had,

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

like, basically grabbed like mashed with pumpkin and breaded in like breadcrumbs and deep fried no as like an Asian carp burger. That was really tasty. Some people have also just like deep fried them and put like a like a garlic butter sauce over top. deep frying them is easily the way to go. They 100% as most things do the best when they've been deep fried. Yeah, but the challenges the economics of eating them break down at an earlier part in the supply chain. Assume that people want to eat them. Okay, great. How do you get them fished to them? But well, the reality is, is that because the industry is so small, you have really high entry costs for fish farmers who would want to actually go out and catch them. So if you're talking about needing to buy trucks, and boats and nets, all of which the fish can be like very hard on, it's 10s of 1000s of dollars right up front. Okay, but let's say you have that money and you go, and you sell these fish to one of the processors that you can find what are they paying you about 10 to 25 cents per pound for these fish. But the reality is, we know that in order for a fisherman to be able to make any kind of profit on these fish, they need to be paid a minimum of 50 cents per pound. But right now, no one is paying that really because there's no market on the other end for it. And then people and then you start thinking, Okay, well, if I go to a bank and say, Can you give me an $11 million loan so I can build a fish processing plant, they're then going to ask reasonable questions like okay, well, so you're you're capturing these fish that are basically on every state agency's naughty list? Well, okay. Should we be basing an industry around an invasive species that ultimately because if we're creating an economic incentive to have them around, how is that not completely contradictory, with like, all of the conservation measures that we're taking to reduce them? But also, okay, well, do you know how many fish are in the river? Well, you don't Okay, how many would you need to remove in order to be profitable? Do you think that you can remove 3040 50,000 pounds in perpetuity for us to have like, or at least until you pay? Yes until you pay If your loan, and the reality is there are so many unknowns that most like banks haven't wanted to take a gamble on this. And then people who said, well, should the state governments be subsidizing this? subsidies are a bit of a four letter word for many US state governments. And so they're looking at this from a free market perspective saying, No, no, no, no, no, this is, this is an economic opportunity. And we're gonna let the market deal with this. My response has always been, but we've had like, for decades for the market to figure this out. And it hasn't. Yeah, and so these are some of the reasons why eating them is really not the simple proposition that many people think it is because, of course, we could eat them. But I mean, even culturally, we have a very different relationship to eating fish in North America than they do in other parts of the world. where like, head on bone in fish presented at the table is the norm. But that's not an origin for many North American consumers when they think of fish. They're thinking of something that has been t boned deep fried and flash frozen. Or they're thinking of like a very pretty salmon fillet from Costco. You know, they're not, they're not thinking, they're not thinking about fish, as it were, they're thinking about something very neat, and very individual, as opposed to something that can look messy and communal. And so that's the big part of the reason why these fish have not taken off as food. And yet, as recently as a few days ago, there are still these efforts to try and like, think about ways that we can either rebrand them or or Tinker at the edges to try and get people to eat them. So eating them could be one way to go in terms of what the future is, to your original question about Great Lakes and and Asian carp. I've often likened it to two see lamb prep. And I'm not sure whether if people are familiar with with what's happened in the Great Lakes with sea lamprey, an invasive fish that made their way into the Great Lakes system, the beginning of the absolutely tariff actually terrifying. They look like eels, but they're not eels, they're basically just like a tube fish, that when it opens its mouth, it's probably about maybe the size of a toonie. It's just jagad razor sharp teeth, it pointing in different directions that they basically use to like suck the life forces and liquids from their host fish, they're parasites, basically, they really took off in the 1950s. And were utterly destroying the Great Lakes fishery. Until beginning in the 1950s. And into the 1960s, we found a series of ways through targeted pesticides for their eggs, and installing infrastructure in streams where they spawn so they wouldn't be able to make it to bigger rivers. And we found through these measures that we were able to reduce lamprey populations by about 90%. So they're still present in the Great Lakes, they always will be. But at the very least, they're not the kind of overwhelming destructive force that they were in the 1950s. However, that comes with a cost. It's between cost between 22 and$25 million US every year, split between Canada and the United States to be able to keep lamprey populations in check. So anytime we have a conversation about embeddedness, you say that's what we classify as success. And it is yeah, it changes our perception of what winning can look like. But that is that has been winning against Sealand prey. And anytime I talk about Asian carp, if they're able to establish themselves in the Great Lakes, I really encouraging people to think that like success in controlling them would look something like sea lamprey, in my estimation, that if they are here, and they establish themselves, the odds of us ever being able to eradicate them are virtually impossible. And so the best that we could hope for would be to apply some of the the scientific approaches, but also some of the socio cultural approaches of paying fishermen to go out and catch them as as best we can. To be able to make sure that we keep those numbers in check. Ultimately, the best thing for us to do would be to stop the problem where it is already happened and prevent them from making it here. However, that in itself is proving challenging, given the debates that we're still having about other ways of, you know, keeping the Great Lakes safe because our you know, it costs an awful lot of money to run those electric barriers. It costs an awful lot of money to pay those fishermen. Currently in the United States, they're debating spending several 100 million dollars on another barrier system, called the Brandon road locking dam south of Chicago as yet another choke point to be able to stop these fish from making it to the Great Lakes, but it's costing us hundreds of millions of dollars and it will in perpetuity throughout time and space just to be successful. So The example of sea lamprey is basically all the it's it should be all of the urging, we need to be able to keep them from making it here because we know how destructive lamprey work and we know how much they cost us. And we have every reason to believe that if Asian carp become established, the damage they do could could rival or surpass were lamprey were able to accomplish and be just as expensive if not more costly, to be able to control or manage and future with Asian carp being established here and us not being able to really control them in any way yet, but we're working towards that with different scientific approaches. And you you touched on the new lock and dam that they're putting in, what are some of the most promising scientific approaches that we're looking at now, you mentioned deploying sterile grass carp. And that's the only way we can actually stop those areas that we need to target to get rid of those invasive plants. It's being used with malaria control, using sterile mosquitoes to mix with the other mosquitoes that are throughout the area, just so that they actually aren't able to produce as many offspring because they're now mixed sterile and non sterile individuals. individuales are there other approaches like this to be used with grass carp? And what are what are some of the ways that we're looking to control these populations? I mean, I think the the interesting thing is that we were able to acknowledge, essentially, and again, this is this is contested. Many of the sources I encountered, were able to acknowledge that we collectively made a mistake with silver and bighead. And with black carp, which I haven't touched on much, but they eat mussels and snails and clams, they will be potentially just as disruptive in their own way. But they came a little bit later. Most people acknowledge that we made a mistake with silver and big head and black carp, but that grass carp, if we had have taken our time, and been more careful to think about ways of sterilizing these fishing for for use here from the beginning, rather than just making the the now terrible assumptions that we made about their ability to escape. But also, if they did the impact that they might have in the wild, that there was still a use for them, which is why there is still a thriving industry in raising these fish and shipping them around the country. And using them in different ponds to be able to eat those weeds. People have asked like, you know, was there other uses for them. And the reality was that after after we tried to use them with catfish, and it failed. And I should say it failed. Because these fish got so much bigger than the catfish that it would made it impossible for the catfish farmers to basically call these fish out, they just thrashed and killed the cat fish and injure the processors. And so they stopped using after that. And then we pivoted to using them in sewage lagoons. But then after that funding was cut by the Reagan administration, basically, we just washed our hands of it as if as if we were able to wash our hands with it with these fish that we then just gave open access to. So since then, no one has really tried to find another productive way to be able to use them, we basically, the thinking on them switched from these are super fish that are here to save the day to we made a terrible mistake. And these are supervillains that need to be stopped at all costs. So we've taken that approach. I mean, I spent a whole chapter as well looking at some of the scientific approaches beyond just something like an electric barrier, which is pretty rudimentary to stop them. And the reality is, there are a lot of effective ways in lab that we have found to be able to keep Asian carp from moving not necessarily for killing them, but to stop their their spread. With the idea being that if for example, we could deploy something like like a bubble curtain that really oxygenates the water or if we could, you know, take some like co2, for example, compressed co2, and we could release like, you know, a curtain of co2 along the entrance to a river that we know Asian carp spawn in. If we could do that, and we know then prevent the fish from being able to have access to the spawning rivers, then maybe in time, we can see the populations go down because their numbers aren't able to regenerate. That's a long game. And it could be very costly. But the challenge that I encountered in reading that chapter was a lot of the researchers I spoke with said, Oh yeah, I have peer reviewed papers was like lining my desk, of all of the ways in which the work that we're doing in lab, even if that lab is, you know, actual open, controlled systems lab in like a living lab since they've been able to prove that they have these measures to be able to corral them even to corral them for them for the purposes of of netting them or corralling them, thanking them for being able to access the spawning River. People were even touched on this, the people were looking at the use of pheromones, like particular, like sense that the fish would be able to pick up on. So some people were saying, could we create and synthesize a pheromone for silver carp and release it into a water system that tells all of the female fish who have eggs inside them that hey way, and all in all the males with a melt that, hey, wait a minute, there's a there's all of the conditions are perfect for a spawning activity. And then they would spawn when the conditions are actually at their worst. And we know that all of the water would would be not moving fast enough for their eggs to survive, and the eggs would float from just dropped to the surface, and die. So there's all of these amazing things. But they're all very expensive. And they're all experimental, you know, understandably, they are science experiments that researchers have undertaken. So the question then, is always, how do you move this research from the lab, to the real world, and this is where a regular majority of researchers I spoke with, got incredibly frustrated, because they found that the federal government was willing to give their university money to be able to determine can can sound work? Can air bubbles work? Can pheromones or co2? Can they all work? Again? And again, science came back and said, Yeah, actually, they can, especially in some cases, if you apply one or two of these control measures together, then it can double their their effectiveness. But then when people go to state governments and say, Hey, how about we pilot this? or How are you interested in in, like, you know, utilizing this technology that we've developed in lab in the real world? And the answer very often is, we don't know if we can get the political buy in for it. We don't know if there would be community obligation, we have different interests and stakeholders who might be wary of these problems. What would the impact be on trade, you name it, there's an industry group who would have an opinion about it, especially if it's taking place in a river in the Midwest, or the Great Lakes states. And so we basically hit a brick wall with all not not everywhere, and not with every scientific advance that we made. But the vast majority of them, we have tested them, and they have sat on shelves. There are a few select instances of using sound and bubbles together, that are now going to be experimented with in in pilot programs, I believe, on the Ohio River and parts of Kentucky and Tennessee. But overwhelmingly, we found all these amazing ways to try and corral and stop the fish from spawning. And we have let them collect dust on the shelf. It's so sad. And just to see all of this work and passion going into these research designs and experimental designs and seeing them kind of get shelved. I'm curious to ask you. What do you think, is the most under told story of the Asian carp invasion? Likely, I would say was one of the stories that I tackled at the beginning of the book, which was the role that state agencies and the federal government and all the way up to the United Nations, the role that these actors played in the spread and the proliferation of Asian carp, distort, one of the things I talked about earlier, I think in the introduction to the book was that some of my early forays into Asian carp research sort of came upon a pretty common way of talking about this problem, which was essentially that it was largely ignorant fish farmers who brought the species over, but didn't have like the right biological control measures in place. The fish were able to escape either through flooding or negligence. And then they were able to spread. Very seldom do we talk about why they were brought here for starters. And then even then we talked about the fact that well, it was actually, again, this recommendation from the United Nations it was implemented, and then it was given the go ahead by US Fish and Wildlife Service. And then it was undertaken by a state agency in Arkansas, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, which move forward with does after grass carp were brought here for almost the first decade that they were in the United States, the effort to spawn them to try and figure out what the Goldilocks scenario was for being able to spawn these fish in lab was really work that was undertaken by Fish and Wildlife Service, and Auburn University. So I was so frustrated early on to hear that we were so content in the stories we were telling about these fish to say it was just these fish farmers and then it flooded and here we are, and it's like well, yeah, there were there was a role that fish farmers did clay as we discussed earlier, when when Yeah, but but early on, they were not really the Keystone to this it was like that we have often painted them. So one of the first men who was really involved, especially with silver and bighead carp, and bringing them over, was a man in Arkansas named Jim Malone, who I ended up encountering him in some of the material I read, I traveled to the University of Central Arkansas north of Little Rock to visit the archives there where he donated about 16 boxes worth of material to the archives there. And over a couple of days, I pored through all of the work that this man did in terms of bringing these fish here and then defending them but also working on spawning sterile grass carp as well. He was one of their their biggest proponents for a very long time. And in an interview I was doing with one of the men from Fish and Wildlife Service, who was there at edit most of those early meetings he had recommended to me is like, well, Jim Malone's son lives nearby, he still actually runs the fish farm that his dad started, maybe you'd like to give him a call, you could see if he'd be interested in talking to you about his dad. And so I called Jim Malone, son up just to say, you know who I am, and this researcher down from Canada, I've spent a few days going through your dad's papers in the archives. But I'd love to talk to you about Jim Malone as as person, rather than as I've encountered him through newspaper clippings or government reports. I had to leave him a message. But when he called back, he left me a voicemail because I was doing another interview. And when I listened to the voicemail later, and I'm paraphrasing, but basically he had said, I, you know, you're more than welcome to come out tomorrow morning to talk to me about my dad. But let me just say one thing real quick, if I get even a whiff, that you are here to blame my father for everything that happened with Asian carp, because that has happened before, then I'm gonna ask you to leave my property really quickly.

Unknown:

As Oh, yeah. Oh,

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

but okay. It was it was very surprising for me to hear. But when I thought if this is the first thing out of his mouth, and then he elaborated on, we ended up having a lovely wide ranging interview, he had a, I wrote that he had a puppy, like a spaniel puppy who like came to the office and like hopped up on my lap as we were talking about his dad, lovely interview, wonderful to her, like a good man to speak with about this to get his perspective on where the business came from, and where it's going. He also had some wild stories to tell about the role that he and his father played, taking grass carp down to Panama, to help clean up the Panama Canal. It was so fun, it was so fascinating to speak with him about all these stories. But I think he learned pretty quickly that I wasn't there to pass judgment. But then shared with me a number of stories were passing journalists had stopped in at flyover country, and basically came in to ask someone about their dad and then inadvertently or hopefully intentionally blamed him for everything that happened. And I had to try and make it clear that they listen, I'm just here to understand what motivated him because there's something truly fascinating to me about someone who would devote their life to this, this fish that is now like public enemy number one. But he didn't he didn't see it that way. And no, I'm not going to blame him for not knowing the science that we have now, because that's that's a mug's game as I write, but I wanted to know what motivated him beyond what I was able to find in the archives. But to know, for him that this was how people had presented his father was really a bit of an eye opener for me early on. And so that's why I wanted to spend the first part of the book really talking about the role that universities, state agencies, federal governments all the way up to the UN, the Environmental Protection Agency as well, the role that they all played, so that we move away from this idea that it was just people who didn't know or didn't care. And we start recognizing that no, this was, there was peer reviewed science to back up every claim made about the utility of bringing these fish species here. It just so happens that people tend to forget that science is an evolving process, and that paper papers can be retracted or built upon or refuted with further research. At the time. However, though, adding was really important for people to remember that these were not villains who didn't care. This wasn't like Exxon Mobil burying the research on climate change, right? And their product was like, No, these are these are people who knew as much as they knew. And were being told by people in power in various levels of government that it was worth moving ahead with. And so they did. And so that was actually one of the I think one of the most fascinating, but for me, one of the most under reported, but one of the most fascinating aspects to all the research I did on Asian carp. It's not fair to put all of this blame on people who, who were doing the best with what they knew and what they were told. And, yeah, we need to it. There's a much bigger story and much bigger picture out there, then blaming all of this on just one fish farm or something like that. Absolutely. Now, for someone listening to this podcast that gets all fired up about Asian carp and about conserving native species and all of these different measures that are being implemented or shelved in some cases, what would you recommend to them as being a way that they can get involved and be a part of, of supporting some of these initiatives or something to that effect? Part of that is going to depend on where you are, I know the things that I'm about to say will be particularly regulatory, but we can't underestimate how important I like good old fashioned, like, you know, tub thumping, or standing on a soapbox and yelling about these issues can be. So I mean, if you're, if you're someone that's listening in the United States, then odds are especially someone in the Great Lakes region, odds are very good, then this is an issue that you're, you know, various representatives are familiar with. I often talked about this, when I was traveling throughout the Great Lakes on the book tour, just whenever I was faced with this question was just to say, Well, sometimes if these issues drop off the radar, it's because politicians will think that it's not something that the average constituent of theirs is losing sleep over or thinking about or cares much about. So sometimes actually just reminding the people in charge to show that you care about it, or that you're paying attention, or that you are waiting to see what they're going to do about it, or even just ask them to say, I'm not sure whether you're aware of the danger that these fish face, what are we doing as, as a city as a province, as a state, as a country, whatever level of government you want to talk to, just to say, this is a big issue that is going to have repercussions at all of these different levels? What are what are we doing about it? And I think that there's, there's an old adage about, you know, if someone, like if someone writes into their their MPs, or their MLS office was like, you know about something, they'll assume that, well, if I'm getting a letter from one person, there's probably 10 people who feel like that, versus you know, if they get if they get a tweet, then they might assume that it's just that one person, they have different ways of, you know, being able to like measure, you know, how widespread they think that issue is. So send those letters, make those phone calls, and it doesn't all have to be, you know, accusatory, it's not like Why aren't you doing more, but in many cases, just to say, what are we doing this issue because, you know, we've realized that, like, it's, it's important in a number of ways to make sure that, you know, politicians are aware of what our priorities are for them, to take into the halls of power and to ensure that it is like a two way dialogue. So it's a it's an underwhelming response. I know. But the reality is that most people aren't going to go and buy fishing gear in order to go and how these fish out themselves, like nor nor should they. But, you know, there are some interesting parallels here to what we're currently experiencing with, you know, fighting a pandemic. You know, pandemics cost money, whether it's a you know, of a virus or a species such as Asian carp, and the reality is fighting Asian carp and bringing those populations under control will cost money. So rather than talk about those freshwater resources, and use words like precious, which I hear so often, when people are talking about things like the Great Lakes or our freshwater resources to ask, okay, well, if these things are so precious and so valuable to us, well, I tend to shy away from trying to put like monetary valuations on nature, we do have to spend some time thinking about what these bases are worth to us, free of Asian carp. So if I'm one of those cottagers, who's worried about my access to the family cottage based on whether there's going to be silver carp, like leaping out of the water, well, then I should be especially interested in pushing the government to take issues on this was like, but also be willing to put my money where my mouth is to make sure that the people in charge know that, yes, I know this is going to cost money, and that these things will be expensive. However, the great lakes are worth this to me that I am willing to be taxed, perhaps more heavily than I might normally be, or I'm willing to fund programs dedicated towards this. They don't know unless we tell them. And sometimes with so much going on, it can be difficult to remember that we need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. And so while we have these other pressing issues that we need to be aware of, especially these days, Asian carp are still advancing, they're still in need of managing just as they were before, you know, just to see lamprey are for example, and and so we have to be prepared to take the kind of action that we know as necessary. Be willing to pay for it.

David Evans:

Absolutely. Andrew, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it. I know we went longer than we originally had. plan, but I was just hoping that you could tell the listeners where they can find out more about the work you've done and where they can find your book and where they can find other work that you've done, because I can't recommend the book more highly.

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

Well, thank you so much. Yeah. So again, the book is called overrun dispatches from the Asian carp crisis that was published just only two years ago from a CW press here in Toronto. So it can be purchased wherever books are sold, I'll put a plug in for finding it at an indie store, simply because they, they need our business these days more than ever. But anywhere you're able to find books, you can find a requested there. There is also an audio book version for people who are interested in that format. There's an ebook version of it. I'm on Twitter at Reeves report. So some of my work can be found there. Some of my work is also at Andrew reeves.ca. If people are interested in finding more of a what I've been working on there as well.

David Evans:

Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. Yeah, I hope everyone it gets all fired up about Asian carp and starts looking for ways that they can get connected on this issue.

Andrew Reeves, Author of "Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis":

Wonderful. Thanks so much for having me, David. I appreciate it.

David Evans:

Thanks for tuning in to today's episode about Asian carp. I just like to thank Andrew Reeves for spending the time to chat with me about this amazing topic. Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast because we will be releasing the full deep dive interviews with Kevin irons and Chuck Shea later this week. If you want to help with the Asian carp crisis, you can do so if you live in the Great Lakes area by reporting any fish that seems a little bit strange. Kevin describes bighead and silver carp as silvery large fish that look like they have their head on upside down. I think it's a pretty good description. I'll put links in the show notes about different websites where you can learn more about this topic. And where you can actually report potential Asian carp the might have found to local authorities so that they can take them for investigation. One thing that we can all do to prevent the spread of invasive species, especially aquatic invasive species, is Be really careful with when we move between different water bodies. So if you are moving a boat, make sure that your boat is drained and dry and doesn't have any stowaways on so no muscles, no pieces of plant material, no fish and alive well. No bait that goes between different lakes. Please don't release any fish into any water body. If it's not originally from there. That means I'm looking at you goldfish. I'm looking at you minnows for fishing. All of these types of fish can really be destructive if they're released, unable to read out of control. So please don't bring anything to where it's not supposed to be. And hopefully we will have any more crisises on our hands. Recently, it was discovered that moss balls used in aquariums across western Canada by aquarium hobbyists had actually been hiding a little secret stowaway along with them. Zebra mussels were being brought in and were being sold at pet stores in these moss balls. So these are really examples of ways that we can introduce new species unwittingly. And we have to be really careful. So if you have moss balls in your aquarium, please let Your Local Conservation Officer know. I'm the host and producer David Evans. And I would just like to thank the rest of the team from the aquatic biosphere project, specifically to Paula Polman, Sophie Cervera, and Anna Bettini. Thanks for all of your help. To learn more about the aquatic biosphere project and what we're doing here in Alberta telling the story of water. Check us out at aquatic biosphere.ca. And if you have any questions or comments about the show, we'd love to hear them. Email us at conservation at aquatic biosphere.org. Please don't forget to like, subscribe and leave us a review. It really helps us out. Thanks and it's been a splash

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