Peter Sorensen and his team showed that a strategically placed wall of vibrating bubbles can shield Minnesota from these ruinous fish.
Outside Peter Sorensen’s office stands a life-size cutout of a large man holding a large fish by the gills.
The fish, a bighead carp, is close to five feet long and upwards of 80 pounds. A voracious eater, this carp can wipe out the base of an aquatic food chain.
Not the kinds of fish you’d want in your waters. Unfortunately, both are beginning to invade Minnesota, says Sorensen, a professor emeritus in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology. They now infest the Mississippi River watershed in states from Mississippi to Iowa.
“With our great waters, we in Minnesota and adjacent Wisconsin are like a shining ornament sitting above a huge area of infestation,” Sorensen muses. “But Minnesota could soon become their next home base.
“Experience shows it’s critical to stop them now. If we can, we’ll be the first state to do so.”
Minnesota’s best chance: a single, strategically placed wall of vibrating bubbles known as a bioacoustic fish fence, or BAFF, which can be placed in navigation locks. Sorensen and his team have identified this “bubbling sound deterrent” as the best carp defense—and it will soon become reality.
High stakes for Minnesota waters
Silver carp, bighead carp, and two other carp species were introduced in Arkansas in the 1970s to clean pond water. But they escaped and have now damaged numerous fisheries and ecosystems severely, if not irrevocably.
“Silver and bighead carp are efficient ‘filter feeders’—they vacuum out the ecosystem,” Sorensen says. “Native fish larvae, including walleye and other gamefish, are starved and/or eaten by these carp.”
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