Recently the Mississippi and Illinois rivers have been invaded by aggressive and invaluable fish called Asian Carp. Like the Bristish did the Native Americans, these carp are pushing more valuable fish like catfish and buffalo fish out of their homes. Licenced commercial fisherman drop their nets in hope of catching the money making fish but fend up with thousands of carp. Catfish will provide a fisherman three times as much money then a carp so this is hard on fisherman and business. Illinois Department of Natural Resourses decided they need to get rid of some of these carp so catfish and buffalo fish can repopulate the rivers. How did they do this? The solution is simple, get people to eat them. The Big River Fish Co. supply 30 million pounds of Asian carp to Chinese and Americans to get rib of bones, gut them and clean them. Some of these fish are given to restraunts and the rest is given to homeless shelters or other areas in need of food. I think this will work short term to get rid of some of the carp but in the future they will need to come up with something different so the Big River Fish Co. wont be losing to much money.
I think that getting people to eat the fish will decrease the population but only minimally, depending on how fast the Asian carp spawn. This also doesn't help the livelihoods of the fishermen very much at all. I think that a possible solution might be to research a natural predator to the area that won't affect the ecosystem negatively, such as birds of prey or larger, carnivorous fish. Of course, this will also affect the populations of the other species of fish but because these carp are so abundant, logically and statistically a higher percentage of them will be caught rather than catfish or buffalo fish.
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