Snakeheads In The Thousands Swarm Potomac River Tributary - WP

The water was alive. Snakeheads, hundreds of them, were slithering among the minnows, rising up through the concrete blocks that dam Dogue Creek like salmon leaping for freedom. Sunday was, in the Potomac River's increasingly bizarre snakehead history, a landmark day. And it was something Mark Hammond, in three decades of fishing the Potomac tributary near Fort Belvoir, never dreamed he would see.

"They're in there by the thousands. You could see them literally coming up along the banks. The ones we caught didn't even put a dent in them," said Hammond, 43, an avid bass fisherman from Florida living here temporarily. "We would throw one in the cooler, two others would jump out and we'd have to chase them through the woods." Since last year's discovery that the voracious, nonnative northern snakehead had infiltrated the Potomac River and its tributaries, fishermen have pulled them up in ones and twos, each catch a major event that further solidified the proof of an entrenched and breeding population.

In the first half of this year, about 15 snakeheads were caught in the Potomac and its tributaries, including several in Dogue Creek, but nothing has matched the haul Sunday and yesterday of at least 80. Its cause isn't yet clear. "I think we have the state record," Hammond said of the catch behind the trailer lot where he and his friends drink beer and practice bow-hunting. Nothing was normal about Dogue Creek on Sunday afternoon. The weekend rains had swollen this section, a couple of miles from the Potomac just off Route 1, far beyond its usual thin trickle. The sandy creek bed swarmed with small minnows and bluegills inching upstream toward a marshy pond. Among the smaller fish, Hammond's friend Mike Bowers noticed, were an inordinate number of bass.

"Wait a minute, I thought, those aren't bass," said Bowers, 42, of Mount Vernon. "Those are snakeheads!" Bowers, Hammond and another friend, Tom Dustin, soon got to work. They didn't need bait. With fishing poles armed with three-pronged hooks, they snagged the snakeheads by the backs. They dipped in nets and pulled out clumps of them. They worked into the evening using headlamps to guide their work, hoping, as they had heard, that someone might be offering a bounty for the predatory species.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/10/AR2005101001602.html

I swear I saw this movie on the SciFi channel this summer.

:shrug:

Between the snakeheads and the male bass who also have female reproductive organs courtesy of the hormones from the chicken farms in the mountains, I'd be surprised if there are many fish in the Potomac in 10 years.

must dwarf all others for the next twenty years. Forget about being asleep at the wheel regarding terrorism. Asleep at the wheel regarding the environment will make the former seem inconsequential.

Good one !

:yourock:

on a mad rampage.

:)

GRrrrrr.

You'll come into your own sooner or later...George Burns was the greatest straight man going with Gracie Allen, who got all the laughs.

He got plenty later on.

Create a commercial fishery for snakeheads.

The commercial fishermen will figure out how to make them extinct in no time.

:toast:

Snakehead for dinner just do not be conjuring up image of 'good to eat'.

180

then make them the new NFL Official snack!

Where they even farm them.

sell their caviar at $100 a tin, that should reduce them toot suite.

Tangy Barbecue. Zesty vinnagrette. Cajun spice.

And it's lunch time.

You've made me hungry.

http://www.fws.gov/contaminants/examples/snakeheads.cfm



Not an environmental disaster that can be fixed at this point, I'm afraid. There seems to be a lot of those lately.

They'll take over every watershed in the East!!!!!

Now if they only ate Eurasian Milfoil....

Get 'em off their lard butts sitting on their web lawn chairs and in the water. Yee ha!