Look, up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…. Splash! Whack! Ouch! …Super Carp!

If you’ve been boating on the lower Missouri River lately, you’ve probably seen your share of high-flying fish — silver or bighead carp — that unexpectedly leap around, over and even into boats, sometimes with grave consequences for the occupants.

These days, the experts say, it’s not enough to carry only the standard boating safety equipment on the Missouri, you need personal protection gear, as well.

“When you’re running a small boat on the Missouri River today, be sure to use a tethered kill switch on the engine, wear your PFD and by all means, carry a CDD,” warns Duane Chapman, a fishery biologist who often works on the river around Columbia, MO.

A CDD? What’s that?

“That stands for Carp Deflection Device,” he explains, only slightly tongue-in-cheek as he holds up a metal trashcan lid. It’s now standard issue on Chapman’s U.S. Geological Survey research boats for protection against this new breed of alien invaders from Asia.

Native to China and recently escaped from U.S. fish farms, Asian carp have put new meaning into the term “flying fish.” They can grow to four feet or more and weigh-in at 70 lbs.-plus.

“The silver carp is the real jumper of the four Asian carp species now found in the Mississippi-Missouri River basin,” Chapman says. “These fish seem to hate boats and they’ll jump completely out of the water when a boat is going by, apparently in response to the engine noise,” he reports. “If you crank up a big two-stroke outboard, that really makes ‘em mad.”

They’re called “crazy fish” locally and probably a lot of unprintable other names, especially when they launch a surprise attack into the side of boat or, worse yet, slam into a passenger. This seems to be happening with increasing frequency. Other CDDs carried by boaters on the lower Missouri River and on the Mississippi around St. Louis include boat cushions, plywood, even lawn chairs.

“There have been numerous reports of boaters injured by flying carp and we’ve even had some of our own guys hurt,” Chapman says of river survey teams. “It’s getting dangerous to be out on the water around here.”

Despite it’s angry attitude and aerial antics, the carp is a fragile fish that will bleed profusely and even, quite literally, lose its head on impact, Chapman reports.

“If you’ve got pretty boat and one lands inside, it’s can be a real mess,” he says. “I had one over 10 lbs. that hit a stanchion on my boat so hard the head went one way, the body went the other and the blood went everywhere else.”

Not only are boaters physically at risk, the entire freshwater ecosystem of the Missouri, Mississippi and Illinois river basins are suffering irreparable harm, Chapman says, as these alien invaders continue to spread, by leaps and bounds, as it were.

Enemy at the Gates
Flying just under the freshwater biologists’ radar for a decade or more, three species of Asian carp seem to be gathering steam now and they are headed upstream — in the Missouri and Illinois Rivers as well as in the Mississippi where the fish are now well-established downstream into Louisiana.

Yes, this is another one of those foreign fish that can out-eat, out-swim and out-spawn the locals, one that has biologists, boaters and anglers worried, particularly on the Great Lakes.
Scientists caution that failure to stop the Asian carp’s march up the Illinois River and through the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal to Lake Michigan could wreak more havoc on Great Lakes ecosystems than the previous invasions of the sea lamprey and the zebra mussel combined. Indeed, the International Joint Commission has appealed to the U.S. and Canadian governments to do everything in their power to halt the spread, calling for a permanent electrical barrier on the canal.

An invisible electronic fence that repulses fish began operation on the canal in mid 2002 to contain the nuisance round goby fish as well as zebra mussels upstream and it seems to be working. Headed in the opposite direction, though, the creeping — and leaping — Asian carp threat may now be within 25 miles of Lake Michigan so officials want a back-up electro-fence installed as well as funding assurances so the juice won’t ever be turned off.

If that happens and silver carp take up residence in those sweetwater seas, hard hats could become de rigeur boating wear on the Great Lakes. Meanwhile, back on the Big Muddy, where it’s almost come to that, Chapman says Asian carp now are the most abundant large fish, making up 66.4% of the catch in his research surveys. So now it looks like the only defense will be a strong offense, he says.

Carpé Carp
“We’ll never eliminate this fish from the Missouri River; there’s no way to get rid of them,” Chapman concedes. “We just have to deal with them now that they’re here.”

The Missouri Conservation Department’s plan to deal with Asian carp is to dish them up as seafood. The agency is encouraging commercial carp fishing on the river, publishing recipes for carp cookery and generally promoting the fish as desirable table fare — which they are, Chapman says, but only if prepared properly.

Thus, it could prove a major marketing challenge to put the bony, often muddy-tasting carp on America’s dinner plates. The bottom-feeding fish has long been a staple food in its native China, however, and that offers some hope for a U.S. harvest.

In China, all species of carp are heavily fished, even overfished, to the point that individuals seldom reach the size they attain here. And in China, oddly enough, even silver carp seldom reach to the sky as they do in American waters. That may be because of the intense harvesting or it may have something to do with the relative lack of small motorized watercraft to get them riled up in the first place, Chapman speculates.

So maybe they don’t jump in China; they sure do in the Show-Me State and at least two Missouri Conservation biologists have the war stories to show for it.

Battle Scars
Cruising in his open survey boat last October, Vince Travnichek nearly took a hefty silver carp face-first. While working around a wing dam on the Missouri, a fish suddenly went ballistic alongside, bounced into his lap, slammed into the opposite side, ricocheted off the gunwale and went back in the water. But that’s nothing compared to happened to his colleague, Craig Gemming, who got his teeth knocked out — or at least a filling — by a cannonball carp in August of last year.

Tooling along at about 20-30 mph on a tributary to the Missouri, Gemming says he was standing upright in the boat when a silver carp hit him in the side of the head so hard it knocked a filling out of a tooth — and nearly knocked him overboard.

“I’ve never been hit so hard in my life,” Gemming told reporters. “I never saw it coming.”

What his co-workers saw was a silver carp, estimated at 30 pounds, and since these fish can swim at up to 20 mph before taking off, it’s a wonder the battered biologist got off so easy.

“I had a sore jaw and neck for three or four days,” reported Gemming, who had been hit by flying carp before but only in the leg and shoulder. “I had to get the filling in my tooth replaced.”

Chapman reports a boater being hit in the back so hard by a flying carp that the strike separated one of the man’s ribs from the vertebrae. So while he is very interested in better understanding the life history and habits of the four species of Asian carp in the Missouri River, Chapman is downright worried about the silver carp’s, shall we say, impact, on recreational boating.

“People have been hurt badly already and it’s not out of the question that we could see someone loose their life to this,” Chapman says. “A boater could be knocked unconscious, fall out of the boat and drown.”

More worrisome still, says Chapman, is the fact that the silver carp, which can jump 15 feet in the air, and to a lesser extent, its cousin, the bighead carp, seem to do most of their leaping — either horizontally or vertically, and apparently at random — just behind boats.

“Can you image what would happen to a fast water skier in that scenario,” he asks rehtorically. “These fish hear the noise of the motor and they either get scared or mad and they jump, usually right after the boat has passed. You may be taking your life in your hands to water-ski on the Missouri River now,” he warned.

— By Ryck Lydecker