Invasive Aquatic Species...

Aquatic species:

Common Carp – Garbage fish that sucks the bottom like a vacuum tearing up shallow plants. They breed like rabbits, are ugly as sin, and taste like crap. Crap…Carp. Makes sense to me. If you’re ever luck enough to catch one of these beauts, chuck it up on shore and see if it can adapt to that environment.

Bighead and Silver Carp – The BigHead can weigh upwards of 100 pounds and eat everything in sight. The Silver can hit 60 lbs. and will jump out of the water and knock you out of the boat and into the water, where they will chew you to the bone.

Grass Carp – Another hefty beast that is both harmful and disgusting.

New Zealand Mud Snail – This foreign freak gets it on with itself, produces asexually that is, and can cover a Family Size pizza box with a half million of it’s nasty little brood. It will cover anything and everything.

Round Goby – Sounds like a mischievous character from a Harry Potter book (please don’t sue Mrs. Rowling), but these slimy sludge eaters breed two or three times annually (maybe that’s J.K.’s problem) and live stacked on top each like a 20 story walk up.

Ruffe – This spiky bottom feeder can lay nearly 100,000 eggs in a single season and will decimate the local forage fish population. Goodbye perch, goodbye crappie.

Rusty Crayfish – I always liked these guys. A feisty challenge to catch, decent bait, and better tasting than carp. The problem is, they eat up all the fish eggs and can really muck up the baitfish population for the upcoming season.

Sea Lamprey – This blood-sucking parasite is long, black, and nasty. With a circular row of teeth and a vacuum for a mouth this creature jumped straight out a horror flick. This overgrown leech feeds on game fish and can kill a 40lbs Lake Trout during its lifetime.

Spiny Water Flea – These buggers latch on to your fishing line, lure, net, and anything that touches the water. They displace useful creatures at the bottom of the food chain and don’t taste a thing like the fishies they replace. Check your gear, they can be sneaky.

Zebra Mussel – These hated devils attach themselves to anything sits underneath the waves. They cover it thick and they cover it fast, producing 1 million eggs every year. Massive reproduction without natural predators leads to a horrible, unfixable debacle.

Aquatic Plants:
Curly-Leaf Pondweed – This rapidly growing weeds’ biggest problem is that it is the first to sprout in the spring, which competes with native plants, and then it dies around mid-summer only to leave us with massive floating mats of dead weeds. It is eaten by ducks and used by fish for cover, but it diminishes our biodiversity and this can be a major problem in the long run.

Eurasian Water Milfoil – Milfoil is to Lake Minnetonka as Adrian Peterson is to a sixth grade flag football game. Ideally suited. Our sharp green lawns create a nutrient rich environment that super charges its growth; and heavy boat traffic enables easy transplantation. One little piece, cut from any part of the plant, has the ability to initiate its own infestation.

Physical removal by means “mowing” the countless fields of the weed have failed to provide Our Lake with any viable solution. Clear-cutting the Lake bed only pushes the need for real answers back another day. The increasing costs of the program and its diminishing returns no longer benefit the local community, nor the ecosystem. New solutions must be sought and government officials must be willing to shrug off the old and embrace the new.

Flowering Rush – What a nice pretty flower, I have to admit, but this bugger plans on wiping out cattail and willow populations. For that I will not stand. Can’t this plant just learn to get along?

Purple Loosestrife – Again, not a bad looker, but as I have learned in my short life, sometimes even the pretty ones can be nasty bitches. Loosestrife can grow so thick and dense that animals cannot penetrate it. It provides no shelter and is worthless as a food product. Like my Grandma B always says, “If she can’t cook and won’t clean, it don’t matter what she looks like.” Different time, but you get the point.

Reed Canary Grass – This lean and mean machine grows in a similar manner to your lawn. One plant will sprout, then begin to spread itself out, forming a thick mat of roots a few inches below the surface. This blocks out any and all competing plants and can drastically change to ecology of a wetland area.