Phil Mansfield for The New York Times
Department of Environmental Conservation technicians spike Catlin Creek in Orange County with poison to kill snakeheads. By PETER APPLEBOME
Published: August 6, 2008
WAWAYANDA, N.Y.
Phil Mansfield for The New York Times
Hardly scary as babies, northern snakeheads grow to be destructive.
No doubt someone would have identified the northern snakeheads around Ridgebury Lake and Catlin Creek sooner or later, even if Bill Thompson had not scooted his golf cart to the edge of the pond behind his house and shot two of them with a .22 in May.
But in this case sooner was definitely better than later. Mr. Thompson notified State Department of Environmental Conservation officials, suspecting that he had shot the weird fish he had heard about on the Discovery Channel. They rushed to his pond. And Tuesday he sat in the same golf cart watching a swarm of workers, technicians and agents dump a fast-acting fish poison into the murky green waters and wade around with nets, scooping out whatever they found alive.
“I don’t like the way it looks or the way it smells, and if you don’t stop them now, it’s going to be all you have,” he said. “There are already thousands of them in there.”
Summer is monster season. Maybe it’s the amazing annual discovery that sharks sometimes bite people. If we’re lucky, sometimes we get a gift like the Montauk Monster, the weird carcass — raccoon? Devil spawn from hell? Hoax? — whose photograph became a worldwide Internet sensation last week. And here in Orange County this summer, as it was in Queens in 2005, it’s the northern snakehead, which is something of a fantasy monster and a real one at the same time.
There is definitely something from tabloid heaven in the snakeheads, which are brownish, torpedo-shaped and slimy, with teeth, lungs and gills, and can breathe air and slither across land. Gale A. Norton, United States secretary of the interior when snakeheads were discovered in Maryland in 2002, called them “something from a bad horror movie” before ordering a federal ban. Since then the fish have spawned not one but two bad horror movies, “Snakehead Terror” and “Frankenfish.”
Up close they are, indeed, pretty disgusting flopping around in their plastic containers, weird little tongue poking out in the middle of an open gullet. But then “disgusting” is a relative term. In Asia snakeheads are a delicacy, with a sweetish taste, and are used both as a food source and in rice farming, as predators of rice pests. There are about 30 species over all.
Still, if the plotline of “Snakehead Terror” — hormone-pumped snakeheads grow to monstrous proportions, threatening life and limb in a small town — isn’t all that likely, the more prosaic horror story is much more real.
The snakeheads, which grow to two or three feet in length, breed prodigiously. A single female can produce eggs five times a summer, perhaps 100,000 in all. They ferociously protect their young, so the survival rate is enormous. And they eat everything they can fit in their mouths, so once the population establishes itself, it has the potential to wipe out bass, pike and the other competing populations.
Experts say that once the snakeheads are established in a river system, as they are now in the Potomac, it’s virtually impossible to eradicate them, though it’s too early to know for sure how damaging their impact on the Potomac has been.
Hence the decision, which most residents seem to have grudgingly accepted, to kill every fish in Ridgebury Lake and in Catlin Creek above Route 6, a distance of about two and a half miles, to stop the snakeheads from spreading to the Wallkill and Hudson beyond. Officials used a pesticide derived from tropical plants that prevents fish from being able to use the oxygen in water and breaks down completely in a couple of days.
In two days, more than 100 snakeheads have been caught along with other fish used to measure the local fish population. The water will be restocked starting in about two weeks with largemouth bass, crappie, yellow perch, sunfish and other fish removed before the kill began.
“We think things went very well, but if you want a guarantee that this is going to work and the infestation has been contained, we can’t guarantee that,” said Willie Janeway, regional director for the Department of Environmental Conservation. “But as for the decision to go ahead with it, the risks of the infestation spreading far outweighed the costs of what we did.”
How did the snakeheads end up in Wawayanda? Good question. William Rudge, natural resources supervisor for the regional office of the environmental agency, said a few were probably released accidentally or on purpose by someone who had them in an aquarium or was planning to raise them.
Either way, it all suggests something about why the monster tales carry so much weight.
Like sharks and the Montauk Monster, they speak to our fear of the unknown and life’s unintended consequences. Maybe the killer snakeheads on the loose in “Snakehead Terror” are something of a stretch. But consider real life: Someone perhaps buys a few snakeheads in Chinatown. He dumps them in an upstate pond, and many millions of fish later, they make it to the Hudson.
It would take more than a guy in a golf cart with a .22 to stop them then.
E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com
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