Whooping Cranes Not Hatching

  • One of the goals of the Partnership is to get more cranes to raise young in the wild, but so far, only one crane chick has been successfully hatched and gone on to migrating. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

Wildlife experts are trying to bring back a flock of migrating whooping
cranes in the eastern United States. But there’s a problem. Scientists are
having trouble getting the whoopers to hatch chicks in the wild. Chuck
Quirmbach reports – researchers are taking a closer look at the ten-year-old
rehabilitation effort:

Transcript

Wildlife experts are trying to bring back a flock of migrating whooping
cranes in the eastern United States. But there’s a problem. Scientists are
having trouble getting the whoopers to hatch chicks in the wild. Chuck
Quirmbach reports – researchers are taking a closer look at the ten-year-old
rehabilitation effort:

It’s not easy to get whooping cranes to reproduce, but here in Baraboo,
Wisconsin, researchers have had success at getting captive cranes to produce
chicks.

For the last ten years, the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership has created a
flock of more than 100 whoopers. Researchers hatched the birds
– and trained them to migrate by flying behind ultralight aircraft ….or to
follow adult cranes. The birds now fly between the upper Midwest and
southeastern U.S.

But one of the goals of the Partnership is to get more cranes to raise young
in the wild. So far, only one crane chick has been successfully hatched and
gone on to migrating.

Jeb Barzen is with the International Crane Foundation. He says they can’t
keep supplying the flock with chicks hatched in captivity:

“It’s expensive. it’s expensive in time, expensive in money…expensive in overall conservation effort, because what you put into whooping crane reintroduction you can’t put into other conservation projects at that time. so to be fully successful …you want that population to be
able to survive on it’s own.”

So far, about 16 million dollars has gone into re-introducing whoopers to
the eastern u.s. More than half of that money came from private donors.

The birds’ main summer home is here at the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge
in Wisconsin.

It’s not that the cranes don’t get close to each other. If you watch the cranes here, you can spot single cranes and the occasional couple.

Jeb Barzen pauses to watch two tall white cranes having a territorial dispute:

“Ooh! these birds are threatening each other. that’s a preen behind the wing
threat…that the second bird is doing…so these are not birds of the same
pair.”

Researchers don’t know why the birds are not raising more wild chicks. But
they do have some theories. Even when cranes do make nice and produce an
egg – the relatively young cranes may be too inexperienced to be patient
parents. Black flies may drive the birds off their nest. Or the parents
may be low on body fat and take off to find food.

The crane researchers are gathering data to find out what cranes need for a
successful nesting site. They’re using tracking radios to follow some of the
birds.

Anne Lacy is with the International Crane Foundation. Today she’s driving
around southern Wisconsin listening for the whoopers.

“it’s important to look at what choices they make as a young bird
before they breed…to know how they choose those areas….they need for
water for roosting at night…they need that eventually for nesting.”

This kind of research is being ramped up this spring. That’s because an
independent report raised some concerns about the crane recovery effort.
The report was done by consultants hired by the Whooping Crane Eastern
Partnership. It mentions problems with financial oversight, scientific
coordination, and whether the birds’ main summer home – at the Necedah
wildlife refuge – is the best place for them.

Louise Clemency is with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. And
she is a co-chair of the eastern partnership. She says the crane recovery
effort won’t make any big changes overnight.

“We’re trying to the time to draw the right conclusions so we can
take the right next step.”

Clemency says decisions on the whooping crane experiment could come next
year. In the meantime..she hopes that some crane eggs laid this spring at
the Necedah refuge will hatch.

For The Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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The Psychology of Traffic and Obesity

  • Dr. Tanya Berry says the thing that most often kept people from walking was the feeling that there are too many cars on the street. (Photo courtesy of Nathan Johnson, iWalk)

Researchers tell us one way to stay trim is to walk more often. But that’s hard in some neighborhoods – maybe sidewalks are bad or there’re no stores to walk to. Shawn Allee found one researcher who thinks what really stops us … is actually in our heads.

Transcript

Researchers tell us one way to stay trim is to walk more often.

But that’s hard in some neighborhoods – maybe sidewalks are bad or there are no stores to walk to.

Shawn Allee found one researcher who thinks what really stops us … is actually in our heads.

Dr. Tanya Berry researches physical activity, and she surveyed people living in Edmonton, Canada.

She calculated how trim or fat they were, then she logged details about their neighborhoods, things like how many stores are nearby and how many cars pass through the area.
Berry says the thing that mattered most, and kept people from walking was a subjective feeling that there are too many cars on the street.

“There was too much traffic in their neighborhoods, it made it difficult to walk, so they chose to jump in their cars and contribute to the traffic problem.”

Berry says her research team will look at how buildings and streets can be designed to make pedestrians feel there’s less traffic than there actually is, and maybe feel more comfortable walking down the street.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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More Oceanic Garbage Patches Found

  • Marine researcher Marcus Eriksen says the plastic packaging that wraps nearly all consumer products is killing some marine animals.(Photo courtesy of the NOAA Marine Debris Program)

A giant field of plastic debris is floating in the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean. Now researchers are finding more of these garbage patches in other Oceans. Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

A giant field of plastic debris is floating in the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean. Now researchers are finding more of these garbage patches in other Oceans. Mark Brush has more:

Researchers say there are ocean currents that sort of swirl around like water in a toilet bowl. There called oceanic gyres.

The Algalita Marine Research Foundation was one of the groups that documented the problem in the North Pacific Ocean. This year they sailed to the gyres in the North Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean.

They found miles and miles of plastic fishing line, milk crates, spoons and forks, and bits of plastic bags.

Marcus Eriksen is with the group:

Eriksen: I challenge you to walk into Wal-Mart or a K-Mart and find a product that’s not made from plastic, packaged or labeled with plastic. And we’re finding more and more of this debris being lost onto the ground washing down rivers and streams out to sea.

Eriksen says the plastic is killing some marine animals. Fish, birds, turtles, and whales get tangled up in the mess – or they mistake it for food.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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TV Weathercasters on Climate Change

  • TV weathercasters have differing opinions about climate change according to a recent study. (Photo courtesy of Scott Eric CC-2.0)

A new survey reveals what TV weathercasters think about climate change. Lester Graham reports… that’s important because many people look to the TV weathercaster for information about climate change.

Transcript

A new survey reveals what TV weathercasters think about climate change. Lester Graham reports… that’s important because many people look to the TV weathercaster for information about climate change.

Surveys by the George Mason University researchers have shown many people trust the person who tells you whether to take an umbrella for news of global warming.
Edward Maiback is director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason. The survey revealed different TV weathercasters have different opinions about climate change.

“About half of them tell us, responded to our survey that climate change is real; about a quarter said that it wasn’t and about another 20 percent said that they weren’t sure.”

By comparison, a survey of leading climate scientists found 96-percent of them indicated climate change was real and human activity is a significant cause.

Maybe that differences shouldn’t be surprising. Forecasting the weather is not the same as predicting climate change. Weather… is next week. Climate is the next century.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Stimulating Science With Research Dollars

  • Some government scientists say right now could be the only time in their careers to make some some key environmental advances. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

We’re hearing more and more about federal
stimulus money being used to help laid-off
workers or repair bridges or roads. Shawn
Allee reports the government wants
stimulus money to move through a wish list
of environmental science projects, too:

Transcript

We’re hearing more and more about federal
stimulus money being used to help laid-off
workers or repair bridges or roads. Shawn
Allee reports the government wants
stimulus money to move through a wish list
of environmental science projects, too:

Department of Energy labs say stimulus dollar figures are staggering compared to what the government has been spending on science.

Take a federal renewable energy lab in Colorado.

Jeffrey Baker is a lab director there.

Baker says they’re learning to make ethanol out of plants other than corn. That project’s getting ten million dollars in stimulus money.

“The Recovery Act is allowing us to expand a project we already have, going to, in effect, double the capacity the nation has to do that research and development.”

Other Department of Energy labs got stimulus money for work on high-tech car batteries, smart energy grids, and radar to model global warming.

Some government scientists say right now could be the only time in their careers to make some some key environmental advances.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Interview: From the Pacific Garbage Patch

  • Researchers with Project Kaisei are studying a swirling vortex of trash that has accumulated out in the Pacific Ocean. (Photo by Annie Crawley, courtesy of Project Kaisei)

A huge current rotates in the Pacific Ocean, causing floating plastic trash to gather in a giant vortex of garbage in the middle of the ocean – it’s become the world’s biggest dump. Project Kaisei has sent two ships to the area to study the problem. Doug Woodring is on the New Horizon. He talked with Lester Graham by satellite phone:

Transcript

A huge current rotates in the Pacific Ocean, causing floating plastic trash to gather in a giant vortex of garbage in the middle of the ocean – it’s become the world’s biggest dump. Project Kaisei has sent two ships to the area to study the problem. Doug Woodring is on the New Horizon. He talked with Lester Graham by satellite phone:

Lester Graham: You’re in the middle of the Pacific right now, looking for the Great Pacific Garbage patch. How much luck have you had in locating some of this plastic debris?

Doug Woodring: Unfortunately, too much luck. (laughs) It hasn’t been very difficult. In fact, I’m running into, ah, I can look out the window and see a big floating piece, right now, as we’re going by. But we’ve been, the last 5-6 days, we’ve been in it consistently. It’s not as many big pieces as the world might think, but it’s way many more small pieces than people know. And the reason is, with the UV dedrigation in the plastics, it get very brittle when it’s broken down by the sun, so after some time in the water, when the wave action, it’s very easy for everything to break down and sort of crack. So what we’re getting is what they call ‘confetti’, and it’s just literally in some places many, many pieces per square meter of this stuff. And we are really looking mostly at the surface, so it’s not known yet how deep this is either. So, there’s a lot of stuff out here.

Graham: Why’s this bad for the environment?

Woodring: When you get small pieces, you’ve got mistaken potential food source for animals. So, the marine life can be eating this. It is possible that it gets in the food chain. There are toxins, heavy metals, and persistent organic pollutants that attach themselves to plastics when they float. So, it’s not just a piece of plastic that a marine life eats, it’s a polluted piece of plastic. It’s also a little island, or a little flotation for species that can float around the ocean – and invasive species can go to different parts of the waters or land that wouldn’t have traveled that way otherwise. So, there’s a lot of implications that this science is only just now starting to help us figure out what’s going on.

Graham: Does anybody have any idea what we can do to reduce the impact of this huge garbage patch or to clean it up?

Woodring: Well, this is what we’re out here for. That’s the main part of our mission is to find solutions. And we can’t find solutions until we have some of the answers, and some of the data. So what we’re out here is with two vessels now, over a 30 day period, really looking for that data – water depth, leadings and temperatures and flows and salinity – to see how the plastics and the material, the debris might move around in the ocean. We will, later, be doing some analysis on the material, science of the plastics, to see if it’s recognizable by satellite. Because, obviously, without satellite imagery, it’s impossible to know exactly where the bigger masses are. You know, ‘how to clean it up,’ is going to be a very tricky thing, because the oceans are so big and these particles are not big. It’s all going to come back to what we’re doing on land, really, and the land policies for different ways to bring in better recycling and rebate programs to get a lot of the plastic that is out there today to be reused instead of simply thrown away, and so it doesn’t get into the rivers or the oceans in the first place.

Doug Woodring is a co-founder of Project Kaisei. He spoke with The Environment Report’s Lester Graham.

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Thawing Tundra Speeds Up Warming

  • University of Florida biologist Ted Schuur does field work in the Alaska tundra every summer (Photo courtesy of Ted Schuur)

A report in this week’s journal Nature looks at how thawing ground up North might
impact global warming. Amy Mayer spent some time in Interior Alaska with
scientists at Eight Mile Lake:

Transcript

A report in this week’s journal Nature looks at how thawing ground up North might
impact global warming. Amy Mayer spent some time in Interior Alaska with
scientists at Eight Mile Lake:

Permafrost is ground that’s supposed to be frozen all the time. But for decades it’s been
thawing in places.

When that happens, carbon gets released—potentially contributing to the greenhouse
effect.

Ted Schuur’s a biologist at the University of Florida but he spends his summers doing
experiments near Healy, Alaska.

I tagged along during some field visits.

I met Schuur when we were both living in Fairbanks. He lives far away now, but loves
Alaska. You only work here year after year if you do. Summer field work is brutal – tons
of mosquitoes and you work all the time because the sun doesn’t set.

Pretty soon, we’re there.

“This has to be one of my more photogenic field sites that I ever worked at.”

Tundra surrounds us. We’re just north of the Alaska Range. I can see the snow-capped
peaks. We change into rubber boots, pick up our packs, and, after a few steps, we’re on
the tussocks.

Alaskans often say walking on tussocks is like balancing on basketballs. It’s not easy. If
your feet slip off, they get wet. Schuur’s tall and used to this, so he goes faster than me,
and with less bumbling.

Soon, we’re balancing on lumber instead. Schuur and his group try to protect the areas
where they work with narrow boardwalks.

“When we first came out here, we put these boardwalks that we’re walking on now, big
10 feet pieces of lumber – they’re like 2x6s or 2x8s. But we don’t really want to walk on
the tundra because we come here a lot and you’d end up with a trail in no time and
destroy vegetation.”

Schuur knows trudging across the tundra damages it and he tries to minimize that harm.
But in order to answer his questions about the potential greenhouse effect from thawing
permafrost, he has to dig in.

Schuur saws into the tundra with a bread knife.

“It’s very satisfying. It’s like cutting a big cake – though this is a cake with lots of roots in it.”

He cuts up the plants and packs the roots and the tops into jars.

“We’re going to measure respiration of plants.”

Schuur uses a machine to scrub out the carbon from the air that’s in the jars. The plant
tops and roots will continue to respire carbon dioxide until they die. Later, he’ll use fancy
equipment to “date” the carbon that’s left.

He needs the age of the carbon because when he finds older carbon he knows it’s only
recently escaped the frozen ground. That makes it extra in the system.

At first, Schuur learned, new carbon coincides with more plant growth that uses up the
addition. That means no greenhouse effect.

But, later, the permafrost keeps thawing, more old carbon becomes available, and plant
growth just can’t keep up. That means, carbon dioxide ends up in the atmosphere from
the thawing permafrost – just like it does from burning coal or gasoline.

The thawing may ultimately be a bad thing, but to understand and explain it further,
Schuur wants to document it – or even cause some. Next, he says…

“As strange as it seems, I would love to thaw permafrost on a large scale,
experimentally.”

The dilemma, of course, is that causing a thaw means contributing to – in a small way –
a process that might damage or destroy the ecosystem. But we all emit carbon dioxide,
just by driving.

“Even as I do that and I do an experiment where I melt out a little bit of the permafrost, I
think we’re generating this information that’s helping society answer these huge
questions.”

Schuur says the amount of tundra he’d sacrifice is tiny relative to the whole circumpolar
region, where tons of carbon waits in ground that is frozen now but could eventually
thaw.

For The Environment Report, I’m Amy Mayer.

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Uncovering the Baby Mammoth

The National Geographic Channel is airing a documentary called “Waking the Baby Mammoth” this Sunday. The discovery of an intact baby mammoth carcass is also the cover story of the May edition of the National Geographic Magazine. Lester Graham has more on that:

Transcript

The National Geographic Channel is airing a documentary called “Waking the Baby Mammoth” this Sunday. The discovery of an intact baby mammoth carcass is also the cover story of the May edition of the National Geographic Magazine. Lester Graham has more on that:

(National Geographic) “This is the story of a nomadic reindeer herder, an extinct baby wooly mammoth, and a team of scientists on a quest to learn her secrets…”

One of the scientists on that quest is Dan Fisher. He’s a paleontologist at the University of Michigan.

This nearly 40,000 year carcass is the most complete baby mammoth ever discovered. The scientists named it Lyuba.

Fisher flew to Russia two years ago to get his first look at the mammoth, an animal that’s been extinct for thousands of years.

“It’s overwhelming really to feel the privilege of getting to be that close to something that does hold so many answers to questions many people have.”

Graham: “This was a fascinating find, but I wonder how much has it added to our knowledge of that period.”

“What it tells us about the period is that it was really a wonderful time to be a mammoth – to be a large mammal – on the open steppes of the high north.”

(National Geographic) “For paleontologists this is a time capsule from the Ice Age. When Lyuba lived, the mammoth steppe was at its peak. It was rich with vegetation that sustained millions of woolly mammoths for hundreds of thousands of years.”

An autopsy of the baby mammoth revealed a lot about where she died – 40,000 years ago a dry grassland. Today it’s a frozen tundra in Siberia.

Dan Fisher says the well-preserved carcass still had traces of what Lyuba ate.

“It’s remarkable that we can take evidence that’s with us today, that’s at our fingertips and generate from that new understanding that can give us perspective on big questions like extinction and climate change, issues that we certainly will have to continue to face as we deal with other endangered species and with the future of our own civilization and planet.”

Fisher says the mammoth remains help add to our understanding of a related animal still around today, the elephant. And they help us better understand our impacts on other endangered species.

And Fisher says learning more about the climate 40,000 years ago can help us understand one other thing.

“We want to, of course, understand the Earth’s climate system better and one of the ways we can test the computer models that help us to project patterns of climate change into the future is to essentially try them out on the past. The past is essentially the training wheels for learning to refine these models. So, information from Lyuba and other mammoths can help us to develop a better understanding of how the Earth’s climate system works.”

(National Geographic) “Dan Fisher and his colleagues will continue to unravel Lyuba’s secrets and to search for reasons why mammals went extinct at the end of the Ice Age.”

The National Geographic program indicates research continues to reveal a lot about Lyuba’s life, and her death, which the scientists begin to piece together in the documentary.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Songbirds’ Numbers Flying South

  • A Nashville Warbler - one of the birds that Matt Etterson heard during this bird count in Canada (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

The numbers and types of songbirds
are dropping dramatically in many areas of
the country. A lot of people are trying to
get a better count on the number of birds
that are still around. Stephanie Hemphill recently went with researchers
on one of the more ambitious bird count projects:

Transcript

The numbers and types of songbirds
are dropping dramatically in many areas of
the country. A lot of people are trying to
get a better count on the number of birds
that are still around. Stephanie Hemphill recently went with researchers
on one of the more ambitious bird count projects:

The jumping off point for this trip is a tiny airport with a grass runway in
northern Minnesota, about 20 miles from the Canadian border.

We fly for 15 minutes, over trees and swamps as far as the eye can see. Down
below we get a glimpse of a moose. And, later, a pair of rare trumpeter swans
in their nest.

The helicopter sets down in what’s known as a floating bog. Its runners are
sitting in six inches of water.

We jump out in knee-high boots and rain jackets, and douse with DEET to try
to keep the mosquitoes away.

I’m following Heidi Seeland, a graduate student who seems to know her way
around a bog.

We’re in knee-deep water. Then it’s thigh-deep Pretty soon it’s waist-deep. I try
to step on a clump of sphagnum moss. But it sinks. It holds onto my boot, and
I’m sitting in water.

Heidi helps me up, and we catch up with the others.

They fan out on different points of the compass. I follow Matt Etterson. He’s an
ornithologist, a bird expert. We slog through the bog for nearly half an hour.
Etterson is aiming for a piece of higher ground, where the trees are a little
taller, better for nesting.

Suddenly he stops. He’s found the spot he was looking for. He sets his watch
for 10 minutes and pulls out a notebook.

Etterson cocks his head this way and that, jotting the names of the birds he can
hear, and the time he hears them. He doesn’t pay any attention to the mosquito
biting the back of his neck. He just listens and takes notes.

“We had a couple of hermit thrush — that’s the singing to the north of us. A
veery called a couple of times to the west of us. A Nashville warbler, and a
couple of western palm warblers, and that was about it. It was pretty quiet
otherwise,” Etterson said.

We trudge through the muck for another 20 or 30 minutes and he repeats the
process.

It’s two hours later, and the three researchers meet at the helicopter landing spot
and compare notes. They’re excited about Etterson’s veery and Nashville
warbler. The others heard a Connecticut warbler and a Lincoln’s sparrow.

They would have been really happy if they’d heard a golden-winged warbler.
It’s one of the most threatened of bird species. The number of golden-winged
warblers has declined by some 80% during the last 50 years.

Today’s trip is an experiment to see how well it works to count birds in remote
places, using a helicopter.

It’ll take five years to finish the bird count here. Then, in 10 or 20 years, they’ll
do it all over again, to see how the birds are faring.

For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

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Killing the Common Carp

  • The Common Carp was introduced a century ago and has been causing havoc in rivers, ponds and lakes ever since. (Image by Duane Raver, courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

In thousands of lakes and ponds across the country, there’s a fish messing up the water.
Some biologists say we’ve never seen these lakes the way nature intended due to the
common carp. The usual method to get rid of the common carp is to kill everything in
the lake and start over. Some biologists think there’s got to be a better way. Joel
Grostephan reports:

Transcript

In thousands of lakes and ponds across the country, there’s a fish messing up the water.
Some biologists say we’ve never seen these lakes the way nature intended due to the common carp. The usual method to get rid of the common carp is to kill everything in
the lake and start over. Some biologists think there’s got to be a better way. Joel
Grostephan reports:


Common carp are like underwater pigs. They root up aquatic plants. They constantly stir
up the mud in the bottoms of lakes, making them murky. And in some lakes, common
carp make up more than half of the total weight of fish. Peter Sorensen is a fisheries
professor at the University of Minnesota:


“With their habit of rooting around night and day, they will completely destroy the
bottoms of lakes, so they become cesspools.”


And it ruins the habitat for many birds and fish too:


“The fact is they are doing enormous damage. At a level that I don’t think people
fully realize. They are living with us, and we don’t know in many cases, what
these lakes and streams and rivers should be like and could be like.”


Common carp have been in U.S. lakes and ponds for more than a century. They came
from Europe and Asia. At the request of new immigrants, the United States government
stocked carp in lakes and rivers in the late 1800’s. Sorensen says it didn’t take long before
there were problems.


By the early 1900’s, it clicked this was a huge mistake, and they started to remove
them. Good records were not kept, and Sorensen says the overall impression is that
removal efforts didn’t work. Most attempts to control the fish are still unreliable. The fish
is very tough. It spawns every year, and females produce nearly a million eggs.


Fisheries managers try to control carp the best they know how. Some hire commercial
fisherman to net the carp. They also use poison — killing all the carp and all the other
fish in the lake and then start over.


Fisheries managers currently use a chemical called Rotenone, which they say is not toxic
to humans. Lee Sundmark is with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources:


“If we see that a lake that a lake way out of balance, might have a lot of carp,
bullheads, tried biological means, and they aren’t working. Sometimes we get to the
point where we use Rotenone to treat it. We basically clean a lake out, and then we
might restock it.”


The trouble is sometimes not all the carp die. And just a handful of them can reproduce
and dominate that lake within a few years. Peter Sorensen and his team of researchers
believe there’s a better way. Sorenson says he does not object to Rotenone poisoning out-
of-hand but, he says, it’s expensive, heavy handed. He and his team have been studying
carp-infested lakes for the past three years to see if they can come up with a new method
to control the fish.


On this cold day, the biologists are surgically implanting radio tags in carp. The
scientists will be tracking these fish so they can find weak points in their lifecycle.
Prezmyslaw Bajer and his colleague Mario Traveline are about to operate on a fish they
caught:


“She will be collecting data that we will then use to remove carp from the lake. She
will be our carp spy.”


The researchers say if they can figure out the habits, and the instincts of the Common
Carp, they will able to control them in way that’s both — effective, and doesn’t kill all the
other fish in the lake. The study’s lead investigator, Sorensen, says this is important
work:


“Something must be done. This is our first, and most damaging species, and if we
don’t do something with this, that like I said, we can do something about — I wonder
what hope there is for any of them. This is to me, the one you got to take out.”


Sorensen says he hopes he can create a model that can be replicated in different parts of
the country. If he’s successful, the ponds, lakes and rivers that have been assaulted by the
carp for the last century might once again be able to host fish and other wildlife that were
forced out.


For the Environment Report, I’m Joel Grostephan.

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