Snakeheads Slithering Closer To Area Waters

August 1, 2004

Release from: Kurt Bresswein
The Express Times (Pennsylvania)

EASTON -- Two years after making headlines in Maryland, the bizarre northern snakehead fish may have found its way into the Delaware River, state wildlife officials say.

One of several nonnative species invading Pennsylvania waterways, the Asian delicacy is illegal to possess live in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and surrounding states. Federal law prohibits their importation and interstate transportation.

The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission wants to know if anglers come across any of the sharp-toothed, air-breathing species that can drag themselves across land by their pectoral fins.

The commission does not, however, plan to follow Maryland's lead by temporarily poisoning the Philadelphia waterway where the northern snakehead was confirmed July 23 to have been found.

That "would probably do more damage than snakeheads would do themselves," said Dan Tredinnick, the commission spokesman.

An angler caught two northern snakeheads in mid-July in the 17-acre Meadow Lake in Philadelphia. The lake connects to both the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers at their confluence.

Tredinnick reported no such catches in either river but called it a "distinct possibility" that snakeheads have already expanded their territory. The commission does not know how long the fish were in Meadow Lake or how they got there.

A tidal gate designed to keep saltwater in the Delaware Bay at high tide was broken for "an extended period of time" -- long enough to let all kinds of species in and out, Tredinnick said.

None had been reported caught as of Friday in the Delaware River. New Jersey officials have yet to sound the alarm that the snakeheads may be lurking and eating native species and their food supply.

"We have not found any snakehead fish in open waters in New Jersey," said Karen Hershey, spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

After the snakeheads turned up in Maryland in 2002, state Department of Natural Resources officials tried to eradicate them by pumping the poison rotenone into the pond where they were found. Found dead were more than 1,000 juvenile and six adult northern snakeheads, along with all other fish in the pond.

The department neutralized the poison with potassium permanganate about two weeks later. Another attempt at eradicating the snakeheads elsewhere in Maryland involved draining a pond where one had been caught.

But this past May, snakeheads turned up again in the Potomac River. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources' response this time, like that of Pennsylvania officials, is to ask anglers to kill and keep the fish and to notify the department.

Wildlife experts speculate the snakehead came to the mid-Atlantic area as fish for Asian cuisine. It is rumored to have medicinal values.

Kiong Banh, the executive chef and a partner at Twenty Manning in Philadelphia, said you can still get them live in that city's Chinatown.

The Vietnamese-born Banh, who is of Chinese descent, said he cooked snakehead "a long, long time ago" while in the Philippines. He said it has a white meat similar to that of grouper and is delicious steamed with ginger and dry shitake mushrooms and topped with soy, cilantro and scallions.

Banh does not serve snakehead at his restaurant.

"We have a problem to get it fresh, and we can't get a lot to sell it," he said from Philadelphia.

All snakeheads have a torpedo-shaped body and long dorsal and anal fins without spines. Northern snakeheads are typically distinguished by flattened, pointy heads with long lower jaws.

Their appearance is similar to that of eels, bowfins and burbots. But unlike these native species, the snakehead is not supposed to be here and has no natural enemies.

Tredinnick, from the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, said the snakehead draws more attention than other nonnative, aquatic species primarily because of its unusual characteristics. It can live out of water up to three days, which helps it do better than other fish in water with low oxygen.

Other invaders of Pennsylvania waterways have been known to cause bigger problems than the snakeheads have demonstrated. One such fish, the round goby, has thrived since being introduced to Lake Erie and is upsetting the ecological balance by eating other fishes' eggs and taking over their habitat.

That particular fish has gained far less notoriety, outside of Lake Erie communities, than the snakehead. Tredinnick figures the round goby's name just doesn't sound as scary.

"That doesn't excite anybody," he said. "That's the reason snakeheads have sort of become the poster child for invasive, aquatic species."

(More information about identifying the northern snakehead is available at midwest.fws.gov/fisheries/library/fact-snakehead.pdf. Anyone who catches a northern snakehead in Pennsylvania is asked to contact Mike Kaufmann at mkaufmann@state.pa.us.