New Book Relives the Fish Tale That Everyone Ate Up

The story arced and burned like a tracer in the sky, slicing hot and furiously through a summer that would otherwise have limped tepidly and unremarkably to it conclusion.

It was, of course, that kind of breathless, purple prose that helped propel the story of the infamous northern snakehead fish to notoriety around the world last year.

It breathed! It slithered on land! It ate everything in sight!

Maryland's northern snakehead -- the invasive fish found in a backwash gravel pond in Anne Arundel County last summer -- was some of the best copy that Eric Jay Dolin had seen in years.

Not always accurate, he discovered, though his book on the subject, "Snakehead: A Fish Out of Water," is by no means intended to point fingers.

Rather, the author said in a phone interview from his home in Marblehead, Mass., it was a cautionary tale on several levels.

One that clearly could be viewed, as environmentalists and natural resource managers hoped, as an illustration of what ecological horror could be wrought by one creature caught in the wrong place at the right time. (It could eat its way through the pond and then slither over to nearby rivers where it could chomp unknown quantities of native species.)

Or an example of how media, when science offers incomplete or sometimes changing information, can grab and keep running with the flashy stuff, even after it becomes clear that it may not all be true.

Or how capitalism can run roughshod over sober-minded business, when one man sees a fortune in the idea of trademarking a species and another simply worries about safeguarding his property.

But rather than make judgments about such aspects of the snakehead story, Dolin simply tells the amazing tale, from a variety of angles.

"It was fun, because I was doing some of it in real time," Dolin said. "The story was still alive and evolving, so while I was preparing . . . notes, I'd do a quick Google search of newspapers to see what the latest twist was."

For an author such as Dolin -- who has written books on duck stamps and the National Wildlife Refuge System and is putting the finishing touches on a book on the Boston Harbor environmental cleanup -- it was a rare opportunity to write about an environmental issue that spanned a matter of months, rather than centuries.

"I was as curious to see how it was going to end as anyone else was," he said.

Even after it did end, as all good stories must, the snakehead saga echoed for months, Dolin said.

Scientists Steve Early, who commanded the effort to exterminate the snakeheads in the Crofton pond, is going on a speaking tour. Finally, he will get to present the story of a wildlife management problem from the scientist's point of view

Dolin himself doesn't rule out a book tour to help promote public awareness of the snakehead and other invasive species.

And as for the snakeheads?

State officials report that most have been pickled in formaldehyde or stuffed and mounted. Seven, however, continue to grow "in an aquarium behind a locked door, in a locked building, behind a locked gate," a spokeswoman for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources said.

And though some of its perambulating prowess may have been overstated, a new horror has been attributed to the snakehead.

"They're eating each other," said spokeswoman Heather Lynch.

So much for the sequel.