Originally published August 9 2005
Asian predator fish takes up shop in NY waters
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
An Asian predator fish called a snake head has been found in a lake in NY. Officials are considering ways to remove it, as its species has the capability of destroying the local fish population.
This is the first time these fish have surfaced in New York State and environmentalists are racing against the clock to prevent them multiplying in lakes and rivers, as has occurred in some other U.S. states.
We have captured five (in July) and we saw another four or five adults," Jim Gilmore, of the Department of Environmental Conservation's New York City office, said on Wednesday.
While individual snakeheads can be netted, the most sweeping option to eradicate them is to poison the lake, as was done in Maryland several years ago.
But first, state environmental agency planners may try to flood the lake with sea water, hoping to kill off the snakeheads and some other fish that also have a low tolerance for salt, but sparing other species.
Unscrupulous dumping of snakeheads in lakes and rivers by aquariums and restaurants, which keep the fish live, has spread them to waters in at least nine U.S. states -- California.
Florida, Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Hawaii, Rhode Island and now New York, fishery biologists say.
Diners in its native Asia and in restaurants in the United States savor the snakehead as a delicacy.
But environmentalists view the scary looking, all-devouring fish as an unwelcome arrival in U.S. ponds and rivers.
"I don't know of anything they won't eat," said Walter Courtenay, a research fishery biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Gainesville, Florida.
That could be devastating if these creatures -- which can live out of water for a short period and cross small stretches of land -- slither into fisheries, U.S. experts warn.
"If an angler catches a snakehead, by all means they should kill it; not return it to the water and certainly not move it elsewhere," Courtenay said.
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