Americans, Canadians unite to fight the “Machine to eat” carp

Finally, something to unite President Donald Trump, his democratic opponents and the Canadians whom he threatens to annex: a hungry carp fiercely.

The invasive carp, sometimes called Asian carp, was introduced in the United States in the 1970s. And they never stopped spreading – and eating everything on their way – because.

“They eat machines,” said Trisiah Tugade, aquatic biologist of the Invasive Carpes program of Canada, while she and her team slipped along the Grand River – an tributary of the Lake Érié – looking at the fish that fear the specialists will devastate the big lakes.

Because they can eat 40% of their body weight daily, invasive carp was initially considered a tool to control harmful algae in confined areas, such as aquacultures ponds.

But they escaped, probably during the floods, and made their way to the north, including through the Illinois river. This has raised the spectrum of the devastating eater that is established in the large lakes, the largest freshwater system in the world on the surface.

“There is nothing that I have seen who scared more environmentalists than to look at the impacts potentially if the species of Asian carp that are in the Illinois river enter the large lakes and form a reproductive population,” an expert in the University of Michigan, Mike Shriberg, told AFP.

It is a threat that drew the attention of Trump, who calls fish “a threat” and specialists on both sides of the border.

Shock treatment

Each year, Canadian experts are looking for carp in the tributaries of the large lakes considered favorable for Frai and Diet – often grassy areas with warmer and shallow waters.

In the Grand River, Tugade and the main biologist Alex Price supervised an electrofish mission.

The team lowered two stems in the water which released non -lethal pulsating loads, stunning the fish and allowing them to be brought with nets in a tank on board.

The fish have been identified, measured and – if not deemed invasive – elected in muddy water.

Since the launch of the program in 2012, only a few dozen invasive carp has been captured in Canadian waters.

James Hall, whose sport fishing company Hall’emin takes customers to Lake Érié, told AFP that he was one of the first to catch one.

“I was wondering what it was, but I knew it was something different,” he said, describing the moment when he released a water carp a decade ago.

Hall said he had put the fish on the ice and called the government’s carp hotline.

The invasive carp “was very rare to catch, which is great,” said Price, while the insistence of vigilance was essential given the gravity of the threat.

“They can reproduce several times a year and produce hundreds of thousands of eggs in a single event,” he told AFP.

“During the first year of life, they can be too big for our natural predators to eat,” he added.

Distant?

Shriberg has described the great lakes as “the big unit” through American political parties and between Canada and the United States.

Defending them against invasive species was a bipartite priority in states on their coasts, several of which have always been American swing states – such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – he said.

Trump’s white May’s memo confirming his support for efforts against “the economic and ecological threat of the invasive carp”, attracted intermediate praise.

“We are in the most politically controversial moments that I have seen in my lifetime,” said Shriberg, calling Trump’s “calm” note an affirmation of the rare bipartite nature of the great lakes.

But this path in the long term is uncertain.

Trump’s trade war and threats of annexation have set American-American relations. Earlier this year, the president would have told former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that he wanted to revise the treaties governing the Great Lakes.

Shriberg noted that the cooperative management of the navigable path has defined American-Canadian relations, but said that “the hostility of the Trump administration towards Canada … threatens to blow this”.

If the battle against the invasive carp should fail, the consequences would be both disastrous and unpredictable, he added.

“This would cause spectacular changes to the ecological balance of water,” said Shriberg.

And if they have ever been established in the big lakes, “I don’t think you have a chance to really eliminate the population,” he said.

© 2025 AFP