Test of Snakehead Poison Starts

U.S. Officials Seek Ban on Imports, Interstate Transport

OXFORD, Md., July 23 -- The end of the notorious, omnivorous, amphibious northern snakeheads began today in a state laboratory chamber marked QUARANTINE, a room where subjects arrive living but always leave dead.

Measured out carefully and diluted with well water, the poison came in a tray full of plastic bottles, each marked with the concentrations of toxin they contained: 1.5 parts per billion. Three ppb. Six ppb. And the last bottle, marked C -- a control solution that contained no poison.

"Just want to be sure there's no placebo effect at work here," joked Colin Middleton, an assistant to the two state scientists conducting the experiment.

It's unlikely, however, that the baby snakeheads swimming in murky tanks of pond water at the Paul S. Sarbanes Oxford Cooperative Lab would succumb to something as innocuous as tap water.

Their vigor and voracious predatory nature are what brought them to this end and prompted U.S. Secretary of the Interior Gale A. Norton today to brand them as "something from a bad horror movie," then propose a ban on their importation and interstate transportation. That ban could take effect in 60 days.

"The potential threat from release of the fish extends well beyond the local area and has national implications," Norton said, standing next to a foot-long specimen that had been preserved and stuffed. "We simply must do everything we can to prevent them from entering our waters, either accidentally or intentionally."

The northern snakehead, native to the Yangtze River region of China and capable of living through the coldest winters and hottest summers, is a top-of-the-food-chain predator, biologists say.

In the case of the snakeheads discovered last month in a fishing hole behind a Crofton shopping center, investigators determined that two of the fish had been released by a well-meaning man who had planned to cook them but dumped them into the pond instead, unaware of the ecological consequences.

By dumb luck, the pair were male and female and proceeded to populate the pond. Now, 2 1/2 years later, officials fear there could be hundreds, if not thousands, of baby snakeheads grazing their way to adulthood and threatening to upset the natural order.

A task force of experts is preparing to recommend that the pond and everything in it be exterminated to eliminate the risk of the snakeheads escaping into the nearby Little Patuxent River.

With breathing apparatuses that allow them to gulp air, fins that enable them to slither along the ground and the ability to live out of water for days, the snakehead could wreak havoc on native fish populations, biologists say.

So with their death sentence certain, the question that remains is how much poison will be needed to kill all the snakeheads in the pond.

The answer, if not already evident, should come within days. University of Maryland biologists Andrew M. Lazur and John Jacobs today began the process of titrating the poison rotenone into bottles for use in the aquariums containing the baby snakeheads.

Rotenone, used for more than half a century in the United States and derived from the ground-up leaves and roots of trees, works by blocking the fish's ability to filter oxygen from the water.