It is not clear how the snakehead suddenly appeared in the Georgia pond, which is near Interstate 85. He suspects at least one other parent is out there. He said the next step was to conduct genetic testing on the juvenile captives to see if they were related to the adult fish. “We don’t want to see those species replaced with something we are not used to.” “Their parents and grandparents fished,” Mr. That means snakeheads in Georgia could disrupt local anglers. “So we really can’t predict what the danger is going to be, but almost always it can be negative.” “If you take all the bass out, whatever they are eating is going to be changed,” Dr. When it is dumped in freshwater bodies, as in Georgia, it ripples through the food chain. It has also been found in California, Maryland, North Carolina and Florida, among other states. That could affect fish populations native to Georgia, including species of bass and sunfish, he said. The snakehead is not only voracious but can also reproduce at a high rate, disrupting the balance on land and in water, Mr. On Thursday, the team spread out to search streams and wetlands in the area and reports came in to the department’s Facebook page with possible sightings, “but none we have been able to verify,” he said.īut really, what is wrong with having a nonnative species among us? Robinson said.Īsked where they were, he said, “Dead and frozen.” A team went to the pond on Wednesday and nabbed an adult snakehead almost two feet long - possibly the one caught last week - and three juvenile snakeheads, Mr. The fisherman spoke with a state biologist, and this week, the hunt was on. It looked odd, and he took a photograph and threw it back, Mr. Scott Robinson, a fisheries operations manager with Georgia’s Wildlife Resources Division, said that department officials were contacted late last week by a fisherman who had dropped a line and lure in a pond on private property near Lilburn, a city of about 11,000 people in Gwinnett County. And this week, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources announced that its turn had come: A northern snakehead, one species of the fish, was found for the first time in the state, reeled in last week by a man in Gwinnett County. Snakeheads, which are not indigenous to the United States, have nevertheless cropped up in 15 states, even after the ban. “These fish are like something from a bad horror movie,” Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton said in 2002 when she proposed a ban on the import and interstate transportation of the “voracious” live snakehead fish in the United States. There has been no end to the creepy descriptions of the snakehead fish, a slimy, toothy, large-jawed animal that can breathe on land and crawl like a snake, in the decades that it has popped up in freshwater lakes, ponds and rivers in the United States. It was described as “a companion for the Creature from the Black Lagoon” when it appeared in Maryland, as “Frankenfish” when it was caught in Virginia and as the “freshwater fish equivalent of a tank” when it showed up in the Harlem Meer in New York.
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