America Spent $607 Million Fighting Asian Carp. Three Native Fish Did It For Free
#AsianCarp #InvasiveSpecies #AlligatorGar #BlueCatfish #Bowfin #MississippiRiver #IllinoisRiver
At 5 AM on the Illinois River, veteran fisherman Wade Karston pulled up a net that should have held 2,000 pounds of Asian carp. He found three.
For fifty years, Asian carp have been the most destructive aquatic invaders in North American history. The U.S. government spent $607 million trying to stop them — electric barriers, commercial bounties, helicopter surveys, federal task forces. None of it worked. The carp kept multiplying until they made up 95% of the fish biomass in some stretches of the Illinois River.
Then, around 2019, something started killing them. Not a chemical. Not a virus. Not a government program.
Three native predators — fish that Americans spent the entire 20th century treating as garbage, clubbing on riverbanks, and even actively eradicating with poison — quietly came back. And they did, for free, what no human program ever managed to do.
This is the story of how the blue catfish, the alligator gar, and the bowfin shut down the Asian carp invasion at every stage of its life cycle — and what it tells us about the species we throw away.

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