The Parable of the Snakehead
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| Photo credit: Missouri Department of Conservation |
To see the big picture of a small place like Potomac Creek, it might be best to start with a fish story:
The northern snakehead is a beautiful fish – although opinions vary strongly. I caught my first one while tossing lures off a tiny bridge over Potomac Creek. It was a striking catch: a twenty-inch cigar, blotchily camouflaged like a Luftwaffe bomber. So much of fishing’s addictive appeal lies in moments like this, when a portal opens to what swims below. Yet hooking the invasive fish also seemed a bit of a let-down. It didn’t look that different from the “living fossil” bowfin my son had caught a few summers before using bloodworms for bait. The stories and rumors I’d heard had me expecting something closer to an alligator.
From the July 12, 2002 Baltimore Sun:
State investigators revealed yesterday the origin of the ferocious northern snakehead fish that have turned a muddy Crofton pond into a site of alien infestation: They came from New York.[i]
Indeed, officials reacted forcefully when snakeheads appeared in Maryland that year. Biologists electroshocked the pond, and ninety-nine juvenile snakeheads floated to the surface. A formal inquiry followed into how the natives of Asia got in there. Within weeks, state investigators announced they’d found the hobbyist who had dumped the fish into the pond. In a press briefing Captain Sanders of the Maryland Natural Resources Police clarified that two snakeheads – originally from New York – had outgrown their owner’s aquarium. He explained how the man who released this piscine Adam and Eve “had no idea it would create the situation we have today.” No charges were filed because the statute of limitations had expired. The police even withheld the man’s name to ensure his safety. And then, like medieval clergy trusting God would provide a just outcome, the authorities punished the pond. They surrounded it with guards and poisoned it with rotenone, killing every guilty fish within.
Should it really surprise us that hopes of subduing the leviathan proved false nonetheless? Fugitive snakeheads quickly spread southward into Virginia’s silty upper rivers. Scientists warned of the disruptive potential of an invasive predatory fish that breathes on land and could – some feared – ruin a valuable ecosystem. The aquatic food chain might be displaced, or simply gobbled up. Things looked grim. Naturally, for a few people the alarm over the new “Frankenfish” also signaled opportunity, although it’s hard to believe movies like “Snakehead Terror” and “Swarm of the Snakehead” made anyone rich. (All those are real titles.)
Local conservationists worried over the snakehead, too. Ideally, conservationism – the ethos and practice of leaving room for nature, on its own terms – is about listening to voices. But millennia of history make clear that we vastly prefer the songs of our own species; we preserve Birkenau and Nineveh, but not any number of disappearing plants and animals. No one asks the sparrows’ thoughts when a bird hits a plate-glass window. When a billionaire tweets he wants to colonize Mars, we pay attention.
My unlucky fish was in surprisingly low water when it violently bit the plastic frog I’d tossed by a log. Such aggressive strikes have made snakeheads wildly popular with Virginia anglers. The fish might have been guarding its children, which school in balls of nervous, minute fry. But the state law of the time held that a caught snakehead cannot be allowed to live. As the fish lay on the ground, my sons and I knelt to admire its dagger-like teeth, its muscularity and glistening smoothness, before I killed it with heavy stick-blows to the head. Anthropocentrism’s gravity is so strong; we inevitably measure the value of all things, on Mars or elsewhere, against our own need.
And every, every fish tale is a parable.
I use “conserve/conservation” and “preserve/preservation” interchangeably in my posts, as do most tree-huggers. Hence, conservationists are people who, among other things, like to create nature preserves.
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