Potomac Fishermen Enlisted to Expunge Snakeheads

The sun had barely risen when Steve Early tacked up the wanted poster on the wood piling along a Potomac tributary:

"Have you seen this fish?" read the flier, complete with a picture of the northern snakehead. "Please do not release. Please kill this fish by cutting/bleeding or freezing."

Up and down the shoreline yesterday, Early, an assistant director at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and other Maryland and Virginia fisheries officials canvassed marinas and boat launches, warning fishermen that they are the first line of defense against the voracious alien species plucked out of the Potomac River and its tributaries twice in the past eight days.

With no way to rid the river of the snakehead, scientists and fishermen fear the fish could undermine other species there, gobbling up the food supply that such large fish as striped and largemouth bass rely on.

"We're very concerned that there could be a spawning population" of snakeheads, Early said. Mating snakeheads, he added, could generate a "sudden explosion in their population" and feast on fish of several sizes.

"It certainly could have detrimental impacts on the populations of several other species," said Steve Minkkinen, the project leader at the Maryland Fishery Resources Office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "There's no effective fish management method we could use there."

That leaves the fishermen. "No resource agency has the power of the many, many thousands of recreational anglers that are out there on the river," Early said.

Bass fishermen, many of them gathered for a tournament in Southern Maryland yesterday, said they are taking the threat seriously.

"I'll kill him deader than hell," said Roby Johnson, 70, of the snakehead while fishing on the dock at Smallwood State Park's Sweden Point Marina in Charles County. "There's just no way you can control them. You're going to see a lot of dead bass floating around."

The first snakeheads found in Maryland were in ponds, which could be drained or poisoned to stop the spread. The Potomac, which flows more than 380 miles, offers no such options.

In the Crofton pond where the alien fish appeared in 2002, authorities found fewer than 10 adults but more than 1,000 juveniles. Each female can hold 15,000 eggs. There were more snakeheads in the pond than any other type of fish by the time the pond was poisoned.

The discovery of a single snakehead last month at Wheaton Regional Park led authorities to drain the pond, but no other snakeheads were found.

The fish appeared again, in a Potomac tributary near Mount Vernon, and then five days later off the Maryland shore in Charles County. Fisheries officials say the snakehead could flourish in the brackish waters of the Potomac.

The river houses one of the nation's top largemouth bass recreational fisheries and is an important spawning ground for striped bass, officials said. The snakehead, which can grow to 33 inches in length, could also feed on smaller shad and herring, or even soft-shell crabs, authorities said.