SPEAKER_03 0:03

It's a warm summer day on the Illinois River. The water looks calm, almost completely still. Then suddenly.

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Silver carp explode out of the water. Dozens and dozens and more dozens of them. Some weigh more than 40 pounds and launch several feet into the air, almost 10 feet high. Others crash directly into boats, coolers, windshields, and even people.

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The video spread rapidly online. News stations replay the clips constantly, and compilations of jumping carp began circulating around YouTube and social media. For many people, these videos became their first real encounter with invasive carp. And honestly, the footage looks almost unbelievable.

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For a moment, the river turns into complete chaos. But underneath this viral phenomenon lies a much larger story about invasion, borders, environmental control, and the politics of belonging in the United States. How does a carp become tied to national panic in the first place?

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And why are these fish almost always introduced through the label Asian carp? Especially when the United States brought them here on purpose. Hi, my name is June.

SPEAKER_03 1:12

And I'm Jasmine. And I'm Victoria, and we are telling the story of a fish that America invited in and then decided to call for in. In this podcast, we follow invasive carp through the Illinois River, tracing how a fish becomes tied not only to ecology, but also to language, identity, and ideas about belonging in the United States. Because this story is never only about fish, and the word invasive extends beyond biology.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

The story of invasive carp in the United States usually sounds pretty simple. A foreign species enters American waterways, spreads aggressively, destroys ecosystems, and threatens native fish. But that version leaves out one important detail. America invited the fish in. Not accidentally, not secretly.

SPEAKER_02 1:59

The federal government imported carp on purpose and spent decades encouraging people to spread them across the country. In the late 1800s, common carp were considered valuable. The U.S. Fish Commission described them as productive, resilient, and inexpectant to raise. Carp could survive in polluted waters, tolerate low oxygen levels, and reproduce quickly, which made them attractive to a country trying to expand food production.

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Government agencies distributed the fish nationwide, especially in regions with growing immigrant communities already familiar with carp as food. Newspapers praised them. Fish commissions promoted them. Carp were thus framed as useful. Then, almost a century later, another group of carp arrived under a completely different promise. Silver carp and big head carp were imported from China during the 1970s for aquaculture ponds and water waste treatment systems across the southern United States. These fish were supposed to solve environmental problems. Silver carp feed directly on algae and plankton, so operators use them to control algal growth and improve water quality in fish farms.

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And for a while, the system worked. But then the floods came. Flooding that resulted from a particularly heavy rain season allowed carp to escape into the Mississippi River basin, where interconnected waterways created ideal conditions for movement and reproduction. Rivers, especially the Illinois River, became ideal corridors for expansion because silver carp reproduce especially well in large flowing systems. Their eggs have to remain suspended in moving water while developing, which makes river flow critical to their survival. Once populations became established, controlling them became extremely difficult.

SPEAKER_02 3:39

And now today, invasive carp dominate large populations of the Illinois River. In some sections, they account for nearly 60% of the total fish biomass. Commercial harvesting crews remove millions of pounds annually, yet populations continue reproducing and spreading through connected waterways. But not all carp affect ecosystems in the same way. Common carp disturb river bottoms while silver carp feed directly on plankton. Researchers repeatedly point out that these species behave very differently from one another.

SPEAKER_03 4:09

Yet somewhere along the way, those distinctions start collapsing. Earlier government reports often referred to these species more specifically as silver carp, bakehout carp, grass carp, or black carp. But as public concerns intensified, another label starts dominating headlines and political discussion, a four species for one name special, Asian carp. And once that wording became widespread, the story started changing completely.

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As invasive carp populations continue expanding throughout the Illinois River, the conversation starts shifting from how did this happen to a much more urgent question. How does the United States try to stop them?

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Because by this stage, agencies are no longer seriously discussing eradication. The fish are already too widespread throughout the Mississippi River basin, so the focus has become about containment.

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Early management strategies have been relatively scattered. State agencies fund commercial harvesting operations that remove millions of pounds of carp from the river every year. Researchers have tested targeted netting systems, acoustic deterrents, and even carbon dioxide barriers designed to temporarily disrupt fish behavior in confined waterways. While USGS studies tracking tagged silver carp find that the movement patterns are closely tied to flooding events, river flow, and spawning conditions throughout the Illinois River system.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

But none of these approaches fully resolve the larger concern. The Illinois River still connects directly to pathways leading toward Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes. So eventually, nearly everything in this story starts converging at one place. The Brandon Road Lock and Dam in Joliet, Illinois. Ecological anxiety, economic pressure, federal infrastructure, border politics, and even broader questions about protection, belonging, and national space.

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The Brandon Road Lock and Dam sits at one of the most important connection points between the Mississippi River basin and the Great Lakes system. So if invasive carp established reproducing populations beyond the section, agencies fear that the effects could spread throughout the entire Great Lakes ecosystem. A fisheries and ocean Canada's report estimates that invasive carp threatens more than $13 billion connected to fisheries, tourism, and recreational industry across the region. So the federal response becomes increasingly aggressive. A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reports describes the Brandon Road Interbasin Project as a layered deterrence system designed to stop carp before they continue upstream. Plans for the site include electric barriers pulsing through the water, underwater speakers blasting complex sound frequencies, engineered turbulent systems, bubble curtains, and high-velocity flushing mechanisms capable of forcing the fish backwards through the channel.

SPEAKER_03 7:10

Here, the river starts becoming engineered around selective movement. And in the current political climate, the language surrounding the project starts sounding increasingly familiar. Protection, security, containment, preventing entry. The Great Lakes are repeatedly framed as vulnerable waters that must remain protected from intrusion, and the Illinois River starts functioning almost like a checkpoint between the connected ecosystems, where one side is treated as contaminated and the other as protected. The project increasingly resembles a filtration system built inside the river itself, designed to determine which forms of movement remain acceptable and which do not.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

But not everyone approaches the river through that framework of separation and exclusion. A 2023 article by Priscilla Wahhey, Nick Rio, and several other Indigenous researchers argue that invasive species management often depends on rigid divisions between native and non-native species that do not always align with indigenous relational perspective. The article explains that many Indigenous approaches focus less on exclusion and more on ongoing relationships and responsibilities between humans, species, and environment. And this becomes especially important once you look at how the river itself was transformed long before the carp entered the system.

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The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal physically connects waterways that were once naturally separated. Shipping infrastructures reshape migration pathways throughout the region. Industrial engineering alters how water, trade, and species move across the basin. In other words, the ecological boundaries Brandon Road now tries to defend had already been reorganized through human interventions decades earlier. But management discussions often frames the fish themselves as the central disruption while the infrastructure enabling their movement fades into the background.

SPEAKER_03 9:01

So Brandon Road becomes more than a carp barrier project. It becomes an attempt to restore separation inside a river system humans had already connected.

SPEAKER_02 9:10

The same country that imported carp for food production and environmental management eventually starts building massive systems designed to stop their movement. Carp moved through waterways humans created, expand through infrastructure humans connected, and reproduce in river systems humans altered. Yet over time, the fish became framed as foreign invaders crossing into spaces where they supposedly do not belong. And nowhere does that become more visible than the Illinois River. The biology of the carp is only part of the story. The other part lives in language, and it turns out it has consequences that extend far beyond the river. When American regulators began grouping silver, big head, grass, and black carp together under a single label around the year 2000, they reached for a geographic descriptor and called them Asian carp.

SPEAKER_03 10:05

The name was not a scientific classification. It was a shorthand, a convenience, a way of gesturing at origin. But words carry weight that their authors do not always intend. And this particular word, attached to this particular animal at this particular cultural movement, set something in motion that went well beyond fisheries management.

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The label grouped together four ecologically distinct species with different feeding behaviors, different habitats, and different levels of risk to the Great Lakes ecosystem, flattening that complexity into a single threatening noun with a geographic identity attached to it.

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Scientists in the U.S. Geological Survey eventually recognized this as both scientifically inaccurate and socially harmful. And in 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officially dropped the term, acknowledging its role in casting Asian culture in a negative light. This was not a coincidence of timing.

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The decision came at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a moment when anti-Asian violence was surging across the United States, and the connection between racialized language and real world harm had become impossible to ignore.

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The rebrand was not just a scientific correction, rather a response to a cultural reckoning that had been building for years. Minnesota had already banned it from state statutes in 2014 on grounds of cultural insensitivity. The name was only coined around 2000, making it a relatively recent invention rather than a long-standing scientific category, which reveals that naming and conservation is always a political act, and the politics can change.

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These are Silver Carp, the most notorious to the Asian carp family.

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It's kind of ground zero on this invasion.

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Asian carp not only disrupt the food chain, push out native fish, are a nuisance to voters, but they are also extremely dangerous. It's the best defense we have against the ever-growing world of the silent invaders.

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But the damage to a name does not disappear when the name is retired. For more than two decades, the phrase Asian carp circulated through news coverage, congressional hearings, agency reports, and social media, doing a specific kind of cultural work each time it appeared. Researchers from Mondo and Stack, who analyzed 43 newspaper articles covering Asian carp between 2009 and 2017, found that coverage consistently relied on invasion militaristic and fatalistic language, describing the fish in terms borrowed from warfare, catastrophe, framing their movement as an assault and their presence as an occupation.

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Over time, coverage shifted away from the visible spectacle of leaping fish and toward arguments about total ecosystem collapse and irreversible economic devastation, making the threat feel both closer and more absolute. The researchers described this as proximization, a rhetorical strategy more commonly studied in the context of political leaders building support for military action applied here to a fish.

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The effect is to narrow the perceived distance between the reader and the threat until the threat feels personal. Expert government sources dominated this coverage, while community voices, including farmers, anglers, and indigenous fishers, whose lives are most directly shaped by the river, were largely absent from the conversation. This is not a coincidence of coverage. It reflects how the category of invasive is constructed and who gets to construct it.

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Scholar Lisa Fink, writing in the American Quarterly, traces how the label Asian carp functions, not as a neutral biological descriptor, but as a racial framing that mirrors long-standing anti-immigrant rhetoric, positioning both the fish and Asian people simultaneously as foreign threats to a white-coated Native American landscape.

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The word alien, used routinely in invasion biology, carries a second meaning that anyone who has followed American immigration politics will immediately recognize. So does invasion, threat, and barrier. The language of species management and the language of border control are not merely analogous. They draw from the same conceptual vocabulary, and that vocabulary has a history of violence attached to it.

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That history became impossible to ignore during the COVID-19 pandemic when President Donald Trump repeatedly referred to the virus as the China virus and Kung Flu, language that researchers and civil rights organizations link directly to a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes across the United States.

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Why do you keep using this?

SPEAKER_02 15:13

The same rhetorical logic that attaches geographic origin to threat that makes Asian function as a synonym for dangerous, foreign, and unwanted operated in both contexts. It is the same move applied to a virus and to a fish and to people associated with both. The carp comes to embody a wider anxiety about who and what belongs, and the act of removal enacts a vision of nature purified of certain kinds of presence.

SPEAKER_03 15:44

Research by Canavan and colleagues analyzed over 500,000 tweets about invasive species posted between 2006 and 2021 and found that just 1% of users were responsible for 60% of all retweeted content on the subject. Meaning public awareness of the CARP issue was not shaped organically by the communities living alongside the river, but was driven by a small and concentrated group of celebrities, politicians, and activist accounts.

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This brings up a great point by Stephen Cohen and the concept of moral panic. Moral panic refers to the process through which a person, group, or issue becomes socially amplified until it begins representing a much larger sense of danger. Former Senator Al Franken was explicitly identified as one of the most influential amplifiers of Asian carp content specifically. The crisis, in other words, was manufactured at the top and distributed downward in the same way that immigration panics are manufactured at the top and distributed downward by political figures whose relationship to the river or to the border is largely rhetorical rather than lived. So what gets lost in all of this noise is what the language was supposedly describing in the first place.

SPEAKER_02 17:00

The fish did not choose their name. They did not choose their origin. They did not choose the waterways that carried them north, but the name chose what they meant, and what they meant shaped what was done about them. And what was done about them, as we will see, has never been only about the fish. By the early 2000s, field scientists with direct monitoring experience on the river published one of the earliest warnings in Chick 2001, writing that Big Head and Silver Carp were spreading through the Mississippi River basin far faster than institutions were prepared to handle, something that the broader public and policymakers had not yet caught up with.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

By 2009, researchers in SAS et al. studying zooplankton communities in the Illinois River documented that carp reproduction had reached full invasive levels in the region directly connected to the Great Lakes, marking the point at which the problem can no longer be treated as contained or distant.

SPEAKER_03 17:59

What these fish do to a river is not immediately visible. There are no explosions, no sudden die-offs, and no dramatic moments that make for easy news coverage. The damage is quiet and cumulative.

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Silver and big head carp are filter feeders, drawing plankton continuously through their gill rakers as they move through the water column. They feed across both surface and deeper layers, consuming the microscopic organisms that form the absolute base of the aquatic food web.

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A synthesis in nearly two decades of ecological monitoring data of the Illinois River by Alton Ritter et al. found that after carp population surged, zooplankton density in some measurements dropped by as much as 90%, with losses across multiple species groups in both abundance and diversity.

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Zooplankton are what juvenile native fish depend on to survive the earliest and most vulnerable weeks of life. Without them, larvalfish starve before they ever have the chance to grow. And the destruction does not just stop at the food web.

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Common carp in particular are bottom feeders, and as they root through the riverbed searching for food, they churn up fine sediments that cloud the water around them.

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This turbidity reduces the amount of sunlight that can penetrate the water column, which suppresses the aquatic plant growth that native species depend on for shelter and oxygen, and can also smother fish eggs resting below.

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Comparative monitoring data across six reaches of the upper Mississippi River system by Chick et al. from 2020 found that sport fish populations in reaches where silver carp had established showed consistently negative trends over time, while populations in reaches without carp trended positive over the same period. The ecosystem had been reorganized around a single invasive group, and that reorganization was measurable not just in plankton counts, but in the fish that anglers and communities depended on. And these were not just abstract species on a modering chart.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

So when the silver carp show up and the walleye start disappearing, the reaction is not just frustration. It is something closer to a sense of violation, a feeling that something foreign has come in and disrupted what was rightfully theirs. But it's also worth noting how quickly and naturally it reaches for the same language that shows up everywhere else in the story. Invasion, taking over, and things that don't belong.

SPEAKER_03 20:17

That same long-term data by Alton Ritter also showed that even sustained commercial removal efforts produced only localized and uneven recovery, meaning that pulling fish out of the water does not reverse what has already happened beneath the surface. The economic consequences have begun to follow the ecological ones. One of the first studies to put concrete dollar figures on the invasive carp problem in the United States by Brown et al. from 2025 found that by 2020, federal and state agencies had spent nearly $592 million in cumulative management costs and recreational fishing losses in a heavily invaded section of the Illinois River alone came to more than $10 million over a decade. And those figures, researchers noted, are conservative.

SPEAKER_02 21:05

Broader losses tied to food web distribution and long-term decline of native fish populations could not even be translated into economic terms with the available data. The full cost remains quite literally incalculable. Then there is the spectacle that most people associate with carp, the one that fills wildlife videos and the local news segments and gives the whole story its most vivid, unsettling image.

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This jumping behavior starts with understanding their anatomy. Silver carp have a highly developed sensory system called the lateral line, a series of fluid-filled canals running along the lengths of their bodies that detect pressure waves and acoustic signals moving through the water.

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Researchers of Delincy and Sorensen from 2017 have found that all carp species possess sound sensitivity that is significantly more acute than that of native North American fish, allowing them to detect and orient to acoustic disturbances with precision. That most native species simply cannot match.

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When a motor boat engine passes, the fish registers as a threat and responds with an explosive escape reflex, launching them into the air in dense, chaotic eruptions. Controlled studies by Vetter et al. in 2017 confirmed that this behavior is triggered consistently by motorized watercraft and intensifies in direction proportional to population density.

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In a river where carp are sparse, a passing boat might send a handful of fish airborne. In a river like the Illinois, where carp can dominate the biomass, a single boat can send dozens of fish rocketing out of the water simultaneously.

SPEAKER_03 22:38

The high density plus routine boat traffic produces collisions. And those collisions have sent boaters, kayakers, and recreational fishers to the hospital with broken bones, lacerations, and concussions. The fish are not attacking. They're reacting. But on a river that carries much of this traffic and this many carp, the distinction offers little comfort to the person on the boat. And these fish do not stay put.

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Telemetry tracking of the silver carp in large river systems shows individuals traveling significant distances in response to seasonal temperature shifts, changes in river flow, as well as reproductive pressure.

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The reproduction is tied directly to hydrology. Eggs require moving water to remain suspended long enough to complete critical developmental stages, and periods of increased river discharge can trigger large-scale spawning surges that push populations further upstream almost overnight.

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This movement keeps populations connected across regions so that the areas where removal efforts have temporarily reduced carp density are repopulated by fish traveling from adjacent stretches of the river.

SPEAKER_02 23:44

This is how a species introduced in the South has spent decades advancing steadily northward through the Mississippi River basin and into the Illinois River Corridor to within roughly 50 miles of Lake Michigan. The river is their corridor, and the movements follow patterns that researchers can measure and to some extent predict. But at the same time, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzer has been publicly critical of the Trump administration, especially regarding immigration enforcement policies and the deployment of the National Guard at the border. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the deployment of the National Guard to support immigration enforcement, tensions between the federal government and Illinois only grew stronger. In the months that followed, the federal government withdrew funding for a key invasive cart barrier project, effectively shutting Illinois out of the initiative. That connection is important because it shows how environmental management and border politics can become deeply entangled.

SPEAKER_00 24:45

And this conflict didn't come out of nowhere. Trump and Pritzker have had a long-standing feud that actually predates their political careers. Both of their families were involved in the hotel industry and they have had messy business relationships beginning in the 1970s that continued to shape their interactions decades later. What we see here is that political conflicts can have very real environmental consequences. Decisions about invasive species management aren't happening in isolation. They're shaped by personal rivalries, political ideology, and larger debates about borders and belonging.

SPEAKER_03 25:19

Beyond the science of invasiveness and the well-known jumping behavior of these fish, it's important to focus on the people interacting with them every day, especially fishermen and indigenous communities whose perspectives are often left out of conversations about invasive carp management. Without those perspectives, the discussion can become dominated by a much narrower environmentalism narrative.

SPEAKER_02 25:40

One example of this rise is what some scholars describe as redneck environmentalism. This form of environmentalism tends to emphasize hands-on conservation and stewardship, fishing, and hunting traditions rather than institutional or urban environmental movements. The term redneck was historically used as an insult towards white rural communities, but many people have since reclaimed it as a source of pride and identity.

SPEAKER_00 26:08

But identity and belonging also shape who gets included in these spaces. Some pro-carp groups operate through tight social networks, where membership often depends on already knowing someone inside the organization. In predominantly white rural communities, those informal barriers can make participation more difficult for outsiders and people of color. That dynamic mirrors larger questions we've seen throughout the story about who gets to belong and who gets excluded.

SPEAKER_02 26:34

The fish that recreational anglers have built entire identities around, the ones that fill coolers and line the walls of bait shops and anchor a very specific idea of what a healthy American river looks like. Rasmussen points out that this attachment runs deeper than sport or hobby. These fish are bound in a white rural vision of nature, a picture of the river as something pure and ordered that certain communities feel entitled to protect.

SPEAKER_03 26:59

The rhetoric surrounding invasive carp also tends to be highly militarized. Discussions often rely on words associated with war, invasion, and eradication. Not to mention, it shows up in practice through management techniques this community celebrates most loudly. Bowfishing tournaments and killing competitions, where participants are ranked and rewarded based on how many carp they can take out of the water. The one who kills the most wins. It's conservation repackaged a sport, and the violence built into it becomes hard to separate from the language surrounding who and what the fish are supposed to represent.

SPEAKER_02 27:34

And when that language is repeatedly paired with the word Asian, it can create associations that extend beyond ecology. Even unintentionally, the overlap between aggressive rhetoric and ethnic identifiers can reinforce cultural biases.

SPEAKER_00 27:51

A 2024 article by Ben Rasmussen goes into this directly. He explains how the repeated emphasis on Asians starts shaping the way people interpret the fish, especially as media coverage increasingly relies on words like invading, taking over, and threatening American waterways. And the label itself flattens major differences between the fish. Species with different ecological behaviors and even different geographic origins become grouped together under a single category of Asian carp. During periods when anti-Asian rhetoric and immigration debates are already politically charged in the United States, especially during the COVID pandemic, the word starts carrying a different kind of weight. So examining the language around invasive species isn't just about semantics. It's about understanding how environmental narratives can also reflect broader social anxieties around surrounding identity, borders, and belonging. So now we're back to where the story began.

SPEAKER_03 28:48

The Illinois River on a warm summer day. But now we understand that the history of invasive carp has never only been biological.

SPEAKER_00 28:55

The fish were imported intentionally, they spread through waterways humans-engineered, and over time the conversation surrounding them became tied to much larger fears about movement, control, and protecting certain spaces from perceived intrusion. Focusing only on environmental damage misses how much the story is also shaped by politics, infrastructure, media framing, and public perception. And that matters because the way people define something as invasive is never completely neutral.

SPEAKER_02 29:23

It reflects ideas about who belongs, what should be protected, and which form of movement become treated as threats in the first place. So the next time silver carp explodes from the surface of the Illinois River, the question is no longer just how the fish got there. It is also why they came to represent so much more than themselves.