Governors who traveled to Washington, D.C., for a Feb. 8 meeting with federal officials on how to deal with Asian carp came home with a new commitment from the Obama administration: a pledge to invest $78.5 million in efforts to keep the aquatic invader from entering the Great Lakes.

In December, the Great Lakes Legislative Caucus urged more federal action as part of a resolution passed at its December meeting in Chicago.

The new year got off to an inauspicious start for state and federal officials working feverishly to protect the Great Lakes from an Asian carp invasion. In January, University of Notre Dame researchers confirmed the presence of Asian carp DNA in Lake Michigan’s Calumet Harbor.

Though no actual Asian carp were found in searches conducted immediately after the discovery, the positive DNA result more than likely means the silver carp has reached the Great Lakes, says David Lodge, director of the University of Notre Dame Center for Aquatic Conservation.

But he adds that the fight to save the lakes from this non-native fish species is far from lost. The key isn’t whether one fish enters the system, but whether enough penetrate it to survive and spread.

“It comes down to a numbers game,” Lodge says. “We don’t know what that number is. But we do know that the more fish there are, the more likely a self-sustaining population will develop.”

Eradicating an established population of Asian carp in the Great Lakes would be an extremely difficult, if not impossible, task. It has been hard enough trying to block the fish from entering Lake Michigan via the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, where Lodge says there are “gazillions of bighead and silver carp below the electric barriers” constructed to keep Asian carp out.

Some of the strategies employed by the multi-agency Asian Carp Rapid Response Work Group have included: enhancements to the existing barriers, application of a fish poison in parts of the canal, and 
the use of “electrofishing” and netting.

The group said in January that it was considering other options as well, such as constructing an additional barrier and changing operation of the shipping canal’s locks. Led by the state of Michigan, several Great Lakes states asked the U.S. Supreme Court to close the shipping canal’s locks. Their request for a preliminary injunction was denied in January. Illinois officials opposed a closing of the locks, saying such a move would cause widespread flooding, shut down the shipping industry and not guarantee the carp would be stopped. The Alliance for the Great Lakes has called for the ecological separation of the Mississippi and Great Lakes basins (the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal connects them).

What would be the consequences of an Asian carp invasion? No one knows for sure, Lodge says. But based on what researchers have been able to observe about the species’ impact on other systems, including the Mississippi River basin, he believes the spread of Asian carp would be “a very bad thing” for the Great Lakes. Large in size, the carp are voracious eaters that could eliminate food supplies for native fish, thus harming the Great Lakes ecosystem and its $7 billion fishing industry.