A Tale of Two Invasives

When is an invasion not an invasion? When the “invader” fades into the environment and becomes more of an immigrant than a conqueror. I saw this firsthand while fishing along the Eastern Seaboard this past week.

Invasive and new species are a fact of life in this global world we live in, and plants or animals running amok have become sadly common. Cheatgrass in the West, kudzu and wild hogs in the South, Japanese knotweet in the Midwest and East, phragmites and purple loosestrife everywhere — these are just a few of the “invader” invasives we struggle with.

All fit into that category because they are aggressive disruptors of existing balance. Note that I do not say “natural ecosystem” because what even is that? Humans have altered landscapes on this continent long before Europeans showed up, notably by controlled burns and wildcrafting. There’s even evidence that suggests the vast Amazon rainforest was effectively a huge, tree-based orchard in pre-Columbian times; this explains the unusual number of edible fruits and nuts in that landscape.

And the blue catfish? Oh yeah, they definitely fall into the invader category.

Ictalurus furcatus is, interestingly, native to the United States, but not to the Chesapeake. In the early 1970s, the Virginia Dept. of Wildlife Resources planted the fish in the James River to increase fishing opportunity. This was one of the last examples of the old way of doing things, where fish and game agencies worldwide thought it a nifty idea to just drop new animals into a place because it might be fun to hunt or fish them. Seems crazy now, but hey, we all get smarter over time… hopefully.

I used to live in Virginia, and would catch blue cats routinely in the brackish waters of the Rappahannock near the town of Tappahannock. But they were incidental, caught alongside croakers, spot, and striped bass. They seemed to fit in just fine.

That was around 1999. Now, blue catfish represent the majority of the animal biomass in the entire Chesapeake region, and are damn near a plague. I fished for them recently with guys from the Maryland chapter of the Coastal Conservation Association on the Potomac River, right in downtown Washington DC.

We barely had three rods in the water before one bent double. As this was a charity fishing trip, the raffle winners all got to the rods first. Within short order, we had three blue cats in the boat, each around 15 to 20 inches long.

Since we planned to cook them for a big dinner in southern Maryland the next day, we bled them all and put the fish on ice as fast as we could catch them. And it was most definitely catching, not fishing.

Within a couple hours, we had an astonishing 40 blue cats on the boat. They were everywhere. The clients grew a little bored of reeling them in, but catching them is God’s work — they eat blue crabs and small native fishes, as well as the equally invasive Asian clam — so we kept hooking and killing the things.

In the end, we collectively caught close to 100 blue cats in less than six hours. The only other fish we caught that day was a lone flathead catfish, which falls into the “immigrant” bucket rather than the invader category. I can tell you cleaning all those fish was a messy, smelly business. We had so many, we gave about a dozen to people walking by on the dock, who were all eager to have fresh fish.

All the cats were pretty much cookie-cutters, weighing between about 2 and 5 pounds, except for one 7-pounder I caught. Blue cats can grow huge, however: The record is 143 pounds, big enough to be invulnerable to any predation other than man. Apparently, if you want to catch those giants, you need to fish in winter.

A few days later, a little farther north, I sought out an even scarier invasive, but the story couldn’t have been more different.

I drove from Maryland to southern New Jersey to meet my friend Joe Cermele, who is skilled at catching the ferocious, feared and generally frightening snakehead.

Snakeheads. You remember them. Frankenfish. Killers. Able to walk on land. They’re coming for your children! Growing to 9,843 pounds and able to swallow cows! The media had a field day with this fish. There was even a low-budget horror movie made about them.

I’d never caught one. Joe has caught lots. But he disabused me of my fantasy of filling the boat with snakeheads, which are legendarily delicious, right off the bat by saying he hoped we’d have a seven-to-ten-fish day. Huh. That’s it?

Turns out that was wishful thinking. Over the course of about six hours, I cast a weedless frog lure maybe 1500 times into every nook and shadow and duckweed patch we found on this river — with Joe assuring me that I was doing all the right things — and while we saw a half-dozen snakeheads, I could not get one to bite.

Apparently one surefire way to catch them is to locate a “fry ball,” a writhing ball of baby snakeheads that ripples the water slightly. The mother or father snakehead will be nearby, as this fish is protective of its young. The idea is to cast a lure around the fry ball, or even through it, and the parent will strike in defense of its children.

Unless that parent has been messed with before. Joe said snakeheads get real smart real fast, and to catch a wary one you basically had to hit it on the head with a lure. I am a good caster, but not that good. Joe is. After I had a fish follow my lure almost to the boat before it lost interest, Joe picked up another lure and literally hit the fish on the head with it. It struck, and whammo! we had our only snakehead.

At the end of the day, it was a fascinating, instructive, and sobering experience.

Are snakeheads invasive? I’d argue not functionally. I’d argue they are simply non-native. Bass and other fish eat their babies, and birds eat the parents. Ospreys apparently love them. Despite all the hype, the reality is that snakeheads are settling into this mixed-up world we live in a lot better than the blue cats. They’re more like pheasants or Hungarian partridges than they are like cane toads in Australia.

The larger lesson here is that with limited resources, it’s far better for us all to do our bit to control the true invasives, like blue cats or Asian carp or feral hogs — or, in the plant world, things like cheatgrass or loosestrife or phragmites or tamarisk. The good news is that a few, like Palmer’s amaranth in North Dakota, or Japanese knotweed in Minnesota, fennel in California, or the Himalayan blackberry all over the West, are delicious edible plants.

Our world is a jumble. Nothing is pristine anymore. That’s our reality. Eat the invasives, yes, but if you can, really put the wood to those that are disrupting our weird, modern balance. I guarantee there’s either an animal or plant that fits this description near you. Get some!