I'd like to take a minute to call your attention to a terrific story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this Sunday on the scientific and political battles that surround efforts to keep the invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes.
Okay, the headline – Fish Barrier vs. Carp DNA: What to believe? – isn't all that compelling. But the story, by Dan Egan, is. It's a beautifully written narrative of experimental genetics research, old-time fish barriers, court battles, exasperated scientists, the U.S. Corp of Engineers and, of course, the relentless progress of the carp toward one of American's greatest fisheries.
It starts with style:
"Anyone who has looked into the soupy river and canal waters flowing through Chicago knows that even with a diver's mask and halogen light you'd be lucky to spot a sunken barge, let alone a fish that might be, depending on its age, no bigger than your thumb.
But that's what a University of Notre Dame team of researchers believed it had essentially done in fall 2009 when 32 water samples taken from the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal above an electrical fish barrier tested positive for Asian carp DNA."
And it never loses that sense of pacing. Egan starts the story in 2009, when the first DNA tests registered, and brings it forward through a thicket of personality and politics. He frames his narrative around David Lodge, the Notre Dame biologist who developed the method of testing carp DNA in water, and Army Corps Major General John Peabody, in charge of the agency's efforts to hold back the carp. At first working together, the two men are eventually driven apart by carp managment questions. In particular, they're divided by the fact that Lodge's test repeatedly finds DNA evidence of the fish upstream from the Corps barriers near Chicago but Peabody remains unconvinced that the findings are real.
At one point, the federal government even sends its own investigators to check out Lodge's laboratory: "The Notre Dame team felt a bit like its spouse had hired a private investigator to catch it cheating," Egan writes. "The investigators found no such evidence."
The main problem becomes this: that while the DNA keeps popping in the water, efforts to catch the actual carp (by use of nets and occasional horrific fish poisonings) come up short. When one carp is finally caught north of barrier in 2010, government officials suggest that perhaps it's been released by some members of Chicago's Asian community performing some kind of unexplained cultural ritual.
To quote Egan again:
As for the story about a human planting it, rumors of "cultural releases" of Asian carp by people of Asian ancestry have swirled around Chicago for years, and the practice of releasing animals into the wild has indeed been historically documented. But when an Illinois Department of Natural Resources spokesman was pressed for any evidence of this actually happening with bighead carp in Chicago, the best he could muster was a link to a Wikipedia article. It stated that animal releases were a common practice during the Ming Dynasty in China.
The Ming Dynasty ended in 1644.
Peabody and Lodge eventually stopped communicating.
Well, I won't give away any more of the story here. You can probably tell already that it's a wonderfully effective use of literary science writing to illuminate the challenges of enacting science policy in our ever complicated world.
UPDATE: I should note that this story is actually part of a series on the Asian carp battle. The first part ran on August 18 and you can find it here. Dan Egan, tells me that the stories grew out of a master's thesis he did last year while studying under Jonathan Weiner at Columbia University, which speaks again to its literary style.
— Deborah Blum
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