Ten years ago, quiet Crofton was thrust into the national spotlight by a fish.
But not just any fish.
The Frankenfish.
It can walk on land! It can breathe air! It will eat everything in sight!
The prospect of a predatory and toothy invader captivated reporters and gawkers for months in the summer and fall of 2002, making the peaceful west county suburb the center of a frenzied story.
The tale of the walking fish garnered attention from as far away as Europe and China. Even Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” got into the act, with Stephen Colbert taking aim at the snakeheads.
“For some reason, it just captured people’s imagination. I think the name, ‘snakehead’ — it’s exciting. It’s like a snake,” said Don Cosden, a fisheries biologist with the state Department of Natural Resources both then and now. “That got people’s imagination.”
A decade later, where the uproar began, there are no reminders of the Summer of the Snakehead.
The privately owned pond where the fish were found sits behind a commercial complex on Route 3.
These days, leaves are dropping off the trees into the calm waters.
There are no more wanted posters for the snakeheads, no one selling T-shirts, no signs of all the drama.
And while the snakeheads were eventually eradicated from the pond — the whole pond was poisoned by the state — they remain an ecological threat to the Chesapeake Bay system.
Snakeheads have colonized creeks up and down the Potomac River, and now they’re spreading into the main portion of the bay and finding more creeks to occupy.
“I hate to be a pessimist, but we’re probably going to see them eventually in most of the tributaries to the bay,” Cosden said.
“The first challenge for us was what it is that we had … not a lot of people were expert in the different snakehead species,” said Eric Schwaab, who was DNR’s director of fisheries at the time. He now runs fisheries programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as an assistant director.
It took an expert in Florida to identify the fish found in Crofton. The verdict: It was a northern snakehead.
Native to Asia, the northern snakehead (Channa argus) can grow up to 40 inches long and has a long dorsal fin running along the top. It has a small head but a big mouth full of big teeth.
And unlike other species of snakeheads, northern snakeheads are hardy enough to survive Maryland’s winters — a big cause of concern for biologists.
Many of the snakehead’s unique attributes were exaggerated during the Snakehead Summer. But there’s some truth at the root of the tales of air-breathing, land-walking fish.
Yes, the snakehead can briefly survive out of water by breathing air. Yes, it can survive in shallow or muddy stretches of water. And yes, it is a voracious predator, eating up plenty of smaller fish.
But, contrary to breathless media reports that summer, the snakehead can’t walk long distances or live out of water for long periods.
“They wanted to attribute to it these characteristics that went beyond the average invasive species,” Schwaab said. “That was sort of more mythology than reality. But it was there nonetheless.”
The story was too good to pass up for many journalists and talking heads, and it mushroomed from a local story to a national and international one. At one point, the state held near-daily news conferences on the banks of the pond.
The publicity possibly hit its peak on July 17, when “The Daily Show” ran its piece on snakeheads.
That’s when Colbert — in the days before “The Colbert Report” — donned an outdoorsy vest and stood in front of a photo of a grassy area. He made the case for his plan to eradicate snakeheads with a series of increasingly ridiculous critters: piranhas, scorpions, spotted and great-horned owls, African condors.
And if that didn’t work? Napalm.
“It’s a circle of life, Jon. It’s a beautiful thing to behold,” Colbert deadpanned to Stewart.
Said Schwaab: “The BBC was nice. But ‘The Daily Show’ was the pinnacle.”
Their previously anonymous lakelets were suddenly on TV and in the newspapers all the time.
“It was overwhelming. It was a media circus,” said Daniel MacQuilliam of the MacQuilliam Organization, the property development and management company that owns the main pond.
MacQuilliam was on vacation in Ocean City when his summer took a dramatic turn.
“I was on the beach and someone was reading the paper on the beach who knew me and showed me,” he said.
MacQuilliam cut his vacation short. Eventually, he agreed to let the DNR poison the pond to kill off all fish and critters in it.
The state’s concern was that during heavy rains or flooding, the pond could spill over into the Patuxent River, about a football field away, providing a path for snakeheads to spread.
MacQuilliam said he didn’t have a choice, even though he had liability concerns about the poisoning.
Crofton businessman Bill Berkshire, who owns two nearby ponds, also agreed to the let the state poison them. Berkshire was initially reluctant. But he came on board and his daughters even sold snakehead T-shirts.
Berkshire was traveling last week and declined to comment.
Eventually the snakehead hubbub died down and people stopped going to the pond, to MacQuilliam’s relief.
Later, the pond got an official name, suggested by MacQuilliam’s son Wes and sanctioned by the government: Walking Fish Pond.
Natural Resources Police eventually tracked down the likely source of the Crofton snakeheads, a man who admitted to dumping live snakeheads into the pond.
He was not prosecuted. It’s now a crime to have live northern snakeheads or to transport them across state lines.
Since then, they’ve colonized just about every freshwater creek along the Potomac. Now snakeheads have been spotted in the Patuxent. Snakeheads also have been found in the Nanticoke and Wicomico rivers on the Eastern Shore, the Rhode River in south county and Lake Elkhorn in Columbia.
While it is illegal to have a live snakehead, the DNR encourages to anglers to catch — and kill — as many snakeheads as their hearts desire. The state has lobbied chefs to put snakehead on their menus, and there are regular snakehead fishing tournaments on the Potomac.
The goal is to at least suppress the snakehead population. It would be impossible to eradicate them now that they are in open-water areas such as the Potomac and the Patuxent, officials said.
In 2002, his team was responsible for donning protective suits and spraying rotenone on the pond to kill all the aquatic life.
“It’s been following me around,” he joked.
Minkkinen is working on an update to a national management plan for northern snakeheads. He said eradicating them completely is not in the cards.
“It’s unfortunate, too, because with aquatic animals, once they get introduced, it’s impossible to control them,” he said. “You can’t stick your head in the water and see where they are.”
Instead, it’s important to focus on educating people that it’s not a good idea to dump snakeheads — or any other fish — into waterways. That’s key with snakeheads, since it appears likely that they’ve popped up because of multiple human introductions.
Scientists also are still trying to figure out just how badly snakeheads are affecting other fish species. Snakeheads are at the top of the food chain and are likely out-competing other fish.
“The book’s still out on the impact of this species. We don’t know,” said Cosden of the DNR. “Certainly in places where it’s become abundant, something’s had to make room for it. Right now, we can’t say what those somethings are.”
But not just any fish.
The Frankenfish.
It can walk on land! It can breathe air! It will eat everything in sight!
The prospect of a predatory and toothy invader captivated reporters and gawkers for months in the summer and fall of 2002, making the peaceful west county suburb the center of a frenzied story.
The tale of the walking fish garnered attention from as far away as Europe and China. Even Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” got into the act, with Stephen Colbert taking aim at the snakeheads.
“For some reason, it just captured people’s imagination. I think the name, ‘snakehead’ — it’s exciting. It’s like a snake,” said Don Cosden, a fisheries biologist with the state Department of Natural Resources both then and now. “That got people’s imagination.”
A decade later, where the uproar began, there are no reminders of the Summer of the Snakehead.
The privately owned pond where the fish were found sits behind a commercial complex on Route 3.
These days, leaves are dropping off the trees into the calm waters.
There are no more wanted posters for the snakeheads, no one selling T-shirts, no signs of all the drama.
And while the snakeheads were eventually eradicated from the pond — the whole pond was poisoned by the state — they remain an ecological threat to the Chesapeake Bay system.
Snakeheads have colonized creeks up and down the Potomac River, and now they’re spreading into the main portion of the bay and finding more creeks to occupy.
“I hate to be a pessimist, but we’re probably going to see them eventually in most of the tributaries to the bay,” Cosden said.
An unusual fish
In the summer of 2002, the Department of Natural Resources got a report of an unusual fish caught in a stormwater pond behind the Route 3 Centre. After receiving photos, DNR biologists quickly figured out it might be some sort of snakehead fish.“The first challenge for us was what it is that we had … not a lot of people were expert in the different snakehead species,” said Eric Schwaab, who was DNR’s director of fisheries at the time. He now runs fisheries programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as an assistant director.
It took an expert in Florida to identify the fish found in Crofton. The verdict: It was a northern snakehead.
Native to Asia, the northern snakehead (Channa argus) can grow up to 40 inches long and has a long dorsal fin running along the top. It has a small head but a big mouth full of big teeth.
And unlike other species of snakeheads, northern snakeheads are hardy enough to survive Maryland’s winters — a big cause of concern for biologists.
Many of the snakehead’s unique attributes were exaggerated during the Snakehead Summer. But there’s some truth at the root of the tales of air-breathing, land-walking fish.
Yes, the snakehead can briefly survive out of water by breathing air. Yes, it can survive in shallow or muddy stretches of water. And yes, it is a voracious predator, eating up plenty of smaller fish.
But, contrary to breathless media reports that summer, the snakehead can’t walk long distances or live out of water for long periods.
“They wanted to attribute to it these characteristics that went beyond the average invasive species,” Schwaab said. “That was sort of more mythology than reality. But it was there nonetheless.”
The story was too good to pass up for many journalists and talking heads, and it mushroomed from a local story to a national and international one. At one point, the state held near-daily news conferences on the banks of the pond.
The publicity possibly hit its peak on July 17, when “The Daily Show” ran its piece on snakeheads.
That’s when Colbert — in the days before “The Colbert Report” — donned an outdoorsy vest and stood in front of a photo of a grassy area. He made the case for his plan to eradicate snakeheads with a series of increasingly ridiculous critters: piranhas, scorpions, spotted and great-horned owls, African condors.
And if that didn’t work? Napalm.
“It’s a circle of life, Jon. It’s a beautiful thing to behold,” Colbert deadpanned to Stewart.
Said Schwaab: “The BBC was nice. But ‘The Daily Show’ was the pinnacle.”
‘A media circus’
The whole affair meant plenty of headaches for the owner of the snakehead pond, as well as for the owner of two adjacent ponds.Their previously anonymous lakelets were suddenly on TV and in the newspapers all the time.
“It was overwhelming. It was a media circus,” said Daniel MacQuilliam of the MacQuilliam Organization, the property development and management company that owns the main pond.
MacQuilliam was on vacation in Ocean City when his summer took a dramatic turn.
“I was on the beach and someone was reading the paper on the beach who knew me and showed me,” he said.
MacQuilliam cut his vacation short. Eventually, he agreed to let the DNR poison the pond to kill off all fish and critters in it.
The state’s concern was that during heavy rains or flooding, the pond could spill over into the Patuxent River, about a football field away, providing a path for snakeheads to spread.
MacQuilliam said he didn’t have a choice, even though he had liability concerns about the poisoning.
Crofton businessman Bill Berkshire, who owns two nearby ponds, also agreed to the let the state poison them. Berkshire was initially reluctant. But he came on board and his daughters even sold snakehead T-shirts.
Berkshire was traveling last week and declined to comment.
Eventually the snakehead hubbub died down and people stopped going to the pond, to MacQuilliam’s relief.
Later, the pond got an official name, suggested by MacQuilliam’s son Wes and sanctioned by the government: Walking Fish Pond.
Natural Resources Police eventually tracked down the likely source of the Crofton snakeheads, a man who admitted to dumping live snakeheads into the pond.
He was not prosecuted. It’s now a crime to have live northern snakeheads or to transport them across state lines.
Spreading
In 2004, the snakehead attention shifted to the Potomac River, where a snakehead popped up next, likely due to an unrelated accidental or deliberate introduction.Since then, they’ve colonized just about every freshwater creek along the Potomac. Now snakeheads have been spotted in the Patuxent. Snakeheads also have been found in the Nanticoke and Wicomico rivers on the Eastern Shore, the Rhode River in south county and Lake Elkhorn in Columbia.
While it is illegal to have a live snakehead, the DNR encourages to anglers to catch — and kill — as many snakeheads as their hearts desire. The state has lobbied chefs to put snakehead on their menus, and there are regular snakehead fishing tournaments on the Potomac.
The goal is to at least suppress the snakehead population. It would be impossible to eradicate them now that they are in open-water areas such as the Potomac and the Patuxent, officials said.
Hard to control
Steve Minkkinen has been studying what to do to control snakeheads. Minkkinen works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Chesapeake office in Annapolis, but was with the DNR during the Crofton snakehead episode.In 2002, his team was responsible for donning protective suits and spraying rotenone on the pond to kill all the aquatic life.
“It’s been following me around,” he joked.
Minkkinen is working on an update to a national management plan for northern snakeheads. He said eradicating them completely is not in the cards.
“It’s unfortunate, too, because with aquatic animals, once they get introduced, it’s impossible to control them,” he said. “You can’t stick your head in the water and see where they are.”
Instead, it’s important to focus on educating people that it’s not a good idea to dump snakeheads — or any other fish — into waterways. That’s key with snakeheads, since it appears likely that they’ve popped up because of multiple human introductions.
Top of food chain
Scientists hope genetic testing of captured snakeheads will reveal whether fish found in different areas are closely related or not. That will give evidence of how many different introductions there may have been.Scientists also are still trying to figure out just how badly snakeheads are affecting other fish species. Snakeheads are at the top of the food chain and are likely out-competing other fish.
“The book’s still out on the impact of this species. We don’t know,” said Cosden of the DNR. “Certainly in places where it’s become abundant, something’s had to make room for it. Right now, we can’t say what those somethings are.”
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