Dead Snakehead Walking

March 24, 2009

Release from: Jake Bleed
Special to ESPNOutdoors.com

BRINKLEY, Ark. — Meet Rufus, an 18-inch-long northern snakehead. He was captured by game officials in Arkansas last year and is now kept as a pet/prop, a sort of living, wriggling WANTED poster for a breed of fish whose extermination has become a top priority for American fisheries.

For a few minutes last Friday afternoon, Rufus was a celebrity.

Television stations from Memphis, Tenn. and Little Rock, Ark. sent cameramen to a news conference outside this small delta town. Once wildlife officials finished describing perhaps the largest and most complex fish-eradication project ever attempted, the cameras got what they came for.

There's Rufus in a water-filled cooler. There's Rufus in a net. There's Rufus in the gloved-hand of an Arkansas Game and Fish Commission worker. Look! You can see his needle-like teeth! And, with a deft flip, there's Rufus slipping away and doing his snakehead thing in a parking lot: flip-flopping across dry land.

While the cameras rolled, a handful of state game employees watched from a distance. They didn't seem amused. They were in the first day of a week-long attempt to kill every snakehead in a small but important watershed east of town. From the bed of a pickup, one of the men offered advice to Rufus. "Tell your boys," the man said, "I'm coming."

By most accounts, Rufus' kinfolk, the northern snakeheads, a.k.a. channa argus, are up for a fight. Snakeheads are an exotic Frankenfish able to crawl short distances across land, breath air, devour other fish and breed in prodigious quantities. All told, they're poised to fall on North America's native fish like Mongols on Eastern Europe.

"They're tenacious. That's the bad thing about them," said John Odenkirk, a fisheries biologist with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries who has studied the snakehead's appearance along the Potomac River.

A menace, yes, but snakeheads are also a cherished, maybe even holy ingredient in some Asian kitchens, best served in soup or maybe fried with ginger and a pinch of fresh basil. Either way, everyone agrees that snakeheads prefer sluggish, muddy water and lots of vegetation. Which is to say, they're likely to thrive in the Mississippi Delta.

Rufus' press conference took place on the banks of a glorified drainage ditch just big enough to have a name: Big Piney Creek. It meanders south, draining several thousand acres of farmland and swamp east of Brinkley into the Mississippi Delta. Even a glance at a map explains why conservationists are worried snakeheads will take root in the Big Piney. From wetlands and ditches surrounding the creek, the fish's colony can grow, then push south.

"A lot of people are watching us," said Mike Armstrong, chief of fisheries for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and one of the planners of the anti-snakehead program. "They're concerned about this thing eventually breaking out, getting into the Mississippi River and eventually populating the Mississippi River basin. The fish is extremely hardy and adaptable. He can withstand the environmental conditions of the entire Mississippi River drainage, all the way up to Wisconsin and Iowa."

It was last April when a farmer found the first snakehead in Arkansas. Unsure of what exactly was slithering through his drainage ditch, he called game officials. During the resulting investigation, a fish farmer south of Brinkley admitted to importing the fish in 2001, before Arkansas banned snakeheads, Armstrong said, and the farmer agreed to exterminate his fish.

Since April, game and fish officials have found and killed some 150 snakeheads in the watershed. Most were found in a single colony, but occasionally individual fish have been found in ditches and swamps all along Big Piney Creek. After spending most of the summer of 2008 looking for snakeheads in surrounding watersheds and finding none, state officials tentatively planned to begin eradicating the fish along Big Piney Creek in October of last year.

Then, delays. The remains of hurricanes Gustav and Ike blew through, dropping 12 inches of water on eastern Arkansas. Winter set in and water temperatures dropped too low for Rotenone, the fish poison of choice, to be effective.

The more territory the snakeheads colonize, the harder they'll be to exterminate, and the more damage they will do to native bass, crappie and catfish. Fishery biologists in Arkansas believe the snakeheads are contained to Big Piney Creek, at least for the moment. There's a chance to strike now, cover the entire watershed in a thick layer of poison, and neutralize the threat. Or so's the hope.

The plan: Game and fish officers will spread out the watershed around Big Piney Creek and, over the course of a week, they'll treat every bit of water on 49,000 acres of land with Rotenone. Made by pulverizing the root of a plant native to South America, Rotenone is deadly to anything with gills but largely harmless to everything else.

GPS units will track the progress of every team. Waters the team can't reach by ATV will be assigned to officers riding a Marsh Master, a MacGuyvered-up swamp machine that can float, runs on treads like a tank, and is generally very cool. Any other body of water that can't be reached by land or water — including several dozen acres of Cypress and Tupelo swamp — will be treated by a helicopter on loan from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

By the numbers: The project will employ between 80 and 100 fish and game officers, mostly from Arkansas, but some from Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee. Teams will cover some 39 miles of creek and 408 miles of ditches. They'll disperse 24,000 pounds of Rotenone powder and another 3,000 gallons of the poison in liquid form. The total cost of the program: $750,000. And they stand to kill a lot of fish.

The problem is geography. The watershed surrounding Big Piney may appear flat and relatively simple from a map, but driving over the gravel roads or along nearby Interstate 40 reveals just how much water there is to cover: creeks, small lakes and swamps in addition to roadside ditches, culverts, flooded farmland and acre after acre of mud. Snakeheads can thrive in notoriously little water, too, meaning they can survive in just a few inches of brown, muddy scum.

That's what makes the snakehead eradication project in Arkansas one of the most complex and ambitious that organizers say they've ever heard of. Every other attempt to exterminate snakeheads has involved smaller and finite bodies of water — a small lake in New York, ponds in Maryland. Nothing like the warren of lowland swamp outside Brinkley. Snakeheads have taken hold in the Potomac River, a massive watershed too big for any sort of eradication program, said Virginia's John Odenkirk. But he added that, thanks to rugged geography and salt water, the snakeheads are at least limited to the Potomac itself.

Other fish-eradication programs of a similar size have targeted much simpler bodies of water. Armstrong said the only comparable program he's heard of involved streams in the Rockies that had been colonized by invasive brown trout. But a straight, fast-moving trout run is a lot easier to cover.

"This is big news in the conservation area, because nobody's attempted an eradication on this scale of this complexity on an invasive species," Armstrong said. "So there are a lot of states watching us."

Sam Henry, a fisheries biologist with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and a sort-of on-the-ground field commander in the eradication program, put it differently: "We're having to dance with a helicopter. In a Cypress swamp situation, this is brand new. That's why it's so complicated."

Early assessments show the plan is working. As of Monday morning, assessment teams had found about 118 snakeheads in the watershed around Big Piney, Armstrong said. Extrapolate those finding out over the entire watershed, and the kill results are likely to be in the thousands. Most of those killed were juveniles, but Armstrong said teams found a few adults, including some Rufus-sized lunkers 21 to 24 inches in length.

Assessment teams will follow after the eradication teams, taking a census of what types of fish are killed and where. It will be a long week of hot days made all the worse by protective suits, respirators and the Delta sun.

It will be longer yet before fisheries biologists in Arkansas know whether they've snuffed the snakeheads in Big Piney. They'll keep looking for snakeheads, both inside the watershed and further downriver, long after the program ends. They'll know they've done their job, Armstrong said, as long as they never find that first snakehead, alive and wriggling.