Wonder if this story could resonate with the pike situation at Lake Davis?
An excerpt.
Let them eat carp cake;
Carp are bad for rivers but could be a boon for animal bellies
BY ERIC HANDSt. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri) October 2, 2006
Copyright 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc. All Rights Reserved
At Schnucks, crab cakes go for more than $10 a pound. But Andrew Clarke will grind you up a pound of carp cake for little more than 10 cents.
The University of Missouri at Columbia food scientist is working with St. Louis Zoo nutritionist Ellen Dierenfeld on a ground carp fishcake that satisfies pelicans, penguins and sea lions. Their reasons are twofold. First, cheap carp can help the zoo save money on the 60 tons of fish it buys every year. Second, if other zoos buy in to the idea, a new market could emerge and induce fishermen to cut populations of this invasive species.
In the 1970s, two species of Asian carp -- bighead and silver -- arrived in the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. As populations grew and devoured ever more plankton, the carp have crowded out native species like paddlefish, bigmouth buffalo and gizzard shad. The Army Corps of Engineers is spending $9 million on an underwater electrical barrier in Illinois to keep carp out of the Great Lakes.
The carp are eaten in Asia, but shunned as a food in the U.S. Most boaters know the leaping, 20-pound fish only as a nuisance. The fish knock people over and have given some boaters black eyes, said U.S. Geological Survey fisheries biologist Duane Chapman.
Chapman recalled sitting in the back of his 22-foot-long boat as a carp flew towards him from the bow like a missile. It struck him in the arm.
"It hurts. It took months for that lump to go away," said Chapman, who now has six-foot-tall "carp guard" nets around his boat. He is experimenting with sex pheromones to find ways to lure carp into fishermen's nets.
Right now, fishermen get between 10 and 15 cents a pound for the fish -- barely worth their while. By comparison, Dierenfeld pays between 30 to 70 cents per pound for the mackerel and herring she feeds her animals.
The carp cake recipe, a brown-gray gelatin of raw ground carp and glues and vitamins, is a work in progress that will be tested on animals this spring. Dierenfeld is whittling down 19 recipes in search of the right texture -- a carp cake that can be soaked in water for two hours and still hold a torpedo shape as it's flung across the room at a hungry animal. Pelicans and penguins aren't too discerning, she says, but to satsify picky sea lions, the cake will have to mimic a mackerel.
Chapman hopes that people, too, will eventually learn to like carp. "They're really good eatin'," he said.
