Title:
Officials in US Look for Fixes to Carp Problems
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Agriculture Report.
See text below
Text:
Last week our subject was illegal fishing. Now we
report on two cases where fish are both the victims
and the offenders.
The first involves two kinds of Asian carp, bighead
and silver.
They can grow more than a meter long and weigh up to
forty-five kilos. They eat huge amounts of plankton
that other fish need to survive. Silver carp can
also jump high and hit people in boats.
Asian carp were brought to the United States in the
nineteen seventies as a solution. They were imported
to eat algae and other microscopic organisms. They
were put to work as cleaners at fish farms along the
Mississippi River and in wastewater treatment
systems.
But now the fish are moving north toward the Great
Lakes.
They are making their way up a system built years
ago to link the Mississippi to Lake Michigan.
The dangers of an invasion are environmental and
economic.
The destructive carp could spread within the Great
Lakes and threaten fishing and trade.
The Army Corps of Engineers has put an electric
fence in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.
The underwater barrier is meant to shock the carp
into turning back. Only one Asian carp was found
among many thousands of fish killed with poison
while part of the fence was being serviced.
The barrier, however, may not be enough to protect
the Great Lakes. There are calls in Congress for
emergency action. Officials could close shipping
connections between Lake Michigan and the upper
Mississippi River system. But there are no decisions
yet.
So that is the situation in the Midwest. Farther
west, the problem is with common carp. Officials in
Utah want to remove around three-fourths of the carp
from Utah Lake. The lake, near the city of Provo, is
the largest natural body of freshwater in the state.
The state wants to remove millions of carp to
protect an endangered species native only to Utah
Lake, the June sucker fish.
The carp eat plants that the suckers use as hiding
places.
Carp were first put into the lake in the eighteen
eighties as a food source. Now there are so many,
experts say up to twenty metric tons a day could be
removed with nets over a period of several years.
But officials are fishing for ideas about what to do
with all those fish, which could get pretty smelly.
Ideas include using them to fill land, making them
into liquid fertilizer or letting people eat them.
You can share your own suggestions at
voaspecialenglish.com.
And that's the VOA Special English Agriculture
Report.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
