Published: April 03, 2009 10:20 pm      

Nasty aquatic predator update

This summer it will be seven years since northern snakeheads, an exotic and predatory fish, took over not only a small pond near Crofton in Anne Arundel County, but also the front pages of state and regional newspapers.

Alarm spread rapidly after the discovery of the first snakehead — caught on hook and line — and then intensified when fishery biologists poisoned the pond and killed more than 1,000 of the fish of various sizes and ages.

Fishery biologists and anglers feared that the invaders, equipped with healthy appetites, nasty teeth and even worse dispositions, could decimate popular sportfish such as largemouth bass and bluegill. After all, they grow up to 3 feet and weigh 15 pounds.

Fish with this kind of a criminal profile could come to view the spawning and rearing grounds of sportfish as their personal albeit submerged sushi bars.

The literature says that even amphibians, aquatic birds and small mammals are not safe from this mother of all aquatic predators, which, it has been written, can survive out of water for three to four days as it leaves one river apparently looking for another with a greater quantity and quality of snacks.

And you thought that not wearing a personal flotation device from November to May was the least safe thing to do when drifting the Potomac River.

The good news, according to Don Cosden, Maryland’s chief of inland fisheries, is that no snakeheads have been found upstream of the Potomac River’s Great Falls (Montgomery County).

“We did, though, capture and kill two adult snakeheads in the North Branch of the Anacostia River near the Washington Beltway,” Cosden said. Alerted by a trout angler who saw a snakehead follow his lure, agency personnel responded with electrofishing gear and stunned the fish.

“One of them had a 9-inch hatchery rainbow trout in it,” Cosden said.

Two adult fish and a hundred young were found in a drying up Matawoman Creek where they had buried into the mud of a shrinking puddle, trying to survive.

Cosden said he is fairly certain that all of the Crofton pond snakeheads were killed. None is being found in that Patuxent River drainage, he said.

The state is proposing a must-behead regulation beginning in 2010 for anglers who catch snakeheads.

Cosden said extremely young snakeheads swim in a pod near the surface of the water. “It looks like drizzle on the water,” he said. “The adults swim nearby and defend the pod. If an angler sees young fish like that, it is almost certain that the fisherman can catch the adults by tossing a lure nearby.”

Cosden said there is evidence that when the adults are removed, other fish quickly move in and devour the young snakeheads. “That is a good thing,” he said.

Cosden and his biologists want to know if you see or catch snakeheads. When that happens, call your nearest Maryland Fisheries Service office.

“We depend upon anglers,” Cosden said. “We don’t have enough people or money to go out to find and kill snakeheads.”

Contact Outdoor Editor Contact Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.