interesting relationship with people for a very long time today i'm going to talk mostly about common carpet will mention a little bit about asian carp and some work we're going at the university now but we'll focus primarily on common carpet in particular the work i've done in this me the area with all my students since two thousand and nine it's been a great pleasure working with watershed district are projects actually coming to a cause technically in the next few months but i think i can tell you how much fun it's been and such an honor to work with such great people and have everyone's support and h b forward to so anyway we'll just talk a little bit about so many define a little bit common carp is an aquatic invasive species i'll give the definition we'll talk about carp a little bit what they are then something about current biology where they came from the common carp that is if i were to do the same talk with asian carp you'd i'll talk mostly today about all the great work my students including just seen how the doing in the watershed district here what we've learned about them the damage they cause and actually how we've been able pretty much to bring them under control least t level that's manageable and i think that's one of the points with these things so an invasive species defined by state of minnesota which actually parallels the federal definition is something that causes this comes from the outside of the  region causes economic and or ecological harm and it could threaten natural resources so the state of minnesota is just ahead of the state there the interesting thing is that a lot of people don't realize that the story of invasive species aquatic invasive species in minnesota is a very long and old one this matter of fact and if you look at it it's sort of bookended by carp the common carp was the first first one to get here and just now there are a lot of lessons we're starting to bring to deal with this credibly invasive species and now we've got of course the asian carp arriving or seem to be hopefully they don't quite get here but in the last the last decade or so but there's been a whole series of things in the rate of introductions been ever increasing and there are a lot of reasons we should learn from this experience and ways to deal with this problem and waste prevented from getting worse  o today though i'm talking mostly about carp the invasive speed center i have we're starting up at the university now does deal with zebra mussels and invasive plants and all kinds of interesting and important thing carp are basically large river fish that are not from north america and that the term really doesn't mean very much from a scientific perspective in fact it means nothing it just means a large river fish the term goes back several thousand years the are two actually the three major groups of carp the indian major carp which they don't show here because they're not presently invasive in north america the asian carp which i'm not really to talk about very much today which come from asia but now people are calling them other things because if a little bit concerned about that being a derogatory term these these jump in their filter feeders and the ones i'm going to talk about the day our friend which you could call the german carp area and they've been in our area for well over a century and that's what i'm going to talk about then primarily is the cold called common car but you can hear today that they're really not common at all there are so many of them big because they have a very interesting life history that really has eluded fisheries managers for decades and decades and it's not just here in north america it's all across the world the species that invasive in south africa and south america in australia and many many places in including here but of course were mostly concerned with what's happening here the native the common carp originally evolved in the volga region here's here's  caspian sea type area and this area the world now is having all these problems of course and it will really looks quite a bit i've never been there but this is a picture off the web but it really looks a lot like minnesota and that tells you something maybe that's one reason it's done so well here they're wired expanse of water very hot summers very cold winters interconnected and a lot of flooding and that's the home of the common carp and it was first discovered actually by the roman empire couple thousand years ago it was a really tough hearty fish that they could culture in river systems and the gladiators and their families that traveled these huge armies could could actually develop as a food and they brought it out of their bones you can track you can go actually biologist i know when he retired he had his dream vacation with his wife who didn't seem quite so happy and they tracked the track the history of the carp as it as it spread out of ancient rome and across across europe all appear and they were brought out by the romans and they actually brought them everywhere across the roman empire pretty much and raise them but you know eventually ro sacked and there was a really you know in those days of course people didn't have refrigeration they didn't have a lot of food so this animal's really tough and rome was sacked and is turned out the catholic church started noticing  the carpet that point and they raise them in monastery ponds and they became a staple you know and in the catholic diet apparently they were very handy because they don't die very easily and you didn't need refrigeration just put them in a bag and hang them up in the walls of the cellars for a couple days until you need them for friday who never was so they were raised and they spread even further across across europe and then that as the catholic empire that the church sort of faded out a little bit they they were adopted by different eastern europeans and they started stocking them and this still continues to this day across germany poland czechoslovakia those areas they're still raising carp and stocking carp both as a food fish and actually as a game fish it's the number one game fish the united kingdom the common carp and they're not highly invasive there they have to stock them they get very large or one of the largest fish they have and they're their price quite a bit anyway that kind of brings us to the point when this area of the world was being settled really in the mid eighty's hundreds by a lot of people from those very same region c c and they came they came out here and i don't think anybody knows exactly well i don't know if people always know why they do the things they do but they missed their cart they missed their food they missed their clothing they missed their relatives at home and they missed the carpet they used eat they were raised in these aquaculture ponds and just tell you well there are some definite analogies what's been happening with the asian carp as a matter of fact and not quite like this but pretty similar you know we live in a democracy and the thousands of settlers or tens of thousands of settlers living across this entire area the world missed these carp and they started writing congress they wanted the carp and this was part of an ac in which a lot of things were brought over all across the world some of you may know starlings finches things like that they were everything was being moved all over the place and eventually after a massive letter writing campaign thousands of letters being sent to congress congress got right on it and they put they first commissioner of the fish and wildlife service or became the fisherman wildlife service professor pressor baird on it and they considered the carp exactly the same thing happened with the big headed carp a desirable species with good qualities adaptability done favorable conditions we greatly palatable american fish and very climate harmless and every relationship to natural fishes same analysis was done with with asian carp in the one nine hundred seventy so almost the same thing meanwhile the fish commission or the first one in the state of minnesota made this statement for some years or met resin in the so i'm acquainted with the grand opportunities for car culture i found this book in the university library and would predict if you for short years have brought here in philly a couple words there with millions of surplus carp and this guy really got it right because the carp were brought germany they were raised in the reflecting pools in washington d c right down there they were propagated and then they were stocked across the country in railroad cars for about a couple decades and massive efforts to speed distribut everywhere and as they arrived in places that you shake your head with this all happened you can check it as they arrived even locally here in st paul there were armed guards at the stations and different people were fighting over the carp to deliver them to their different destinations the first place they were stocked in minnesota was one of the first was lake como not far from here and they said they said it's been a good thing that's come to us this year literally a third to half of minnesota was nothing but carp and that's about where we sit today and this is basically some biomass estimates my lab did when we first got into this issue about ten years ago and we did analyses of how many carp were here and we found in many many wakes and this was true just in the local lakes here a half to two thirds of the lakes biomass the blue here was nothing but common carp and when you look across the state of minnesota the red dots here are high catch catches of carp so they were everywhere but it wasn't just minnesota you know the government did a great job and they were just just everywhere and of course as soon as they were everywhere then people started wondering well now what did we really want these things after all so everything that was moving was such great for issuing you know celebration moving forward to get them here all of a sudden had to be put in reverse gear in started going backwards and this by about the one thousand nine hundred say royce that that was the case there were just too many and for some reason people didn't want them anymore people are fickle i guess you know and they decided they didn't taste so good after all maybe it was basically a wild diet didn't suit them quite so well or maybe they found people found a local fish is that they preferred more maybe they never knew what they wanted in the first place were some combination thereof and people started developing ways to control them but and this has been going on for about a century frankly and i'll talk a little bit more about the biology of the carp and why it's a concern and nothing really has worked terribly well from those simple mean so people one of the first things and this is going on really the same same way today commercial fishing a lot of people want to get of the rid of the big headed carp with commercial fishing you know what we've been doing this for one hundred years this doesn't work there are just too many young these things produce it cannot work and people don't want to eat em anyway it's the same story i also tried poisons they tried drawing down they tried barriers and all this kind of stuff so  basically i kind of stepped into this program of i guess i'll tell you i've been working in the great lakes for about fifteen years and i decided to focus my efforts to minnesota and i thought well this was a really interesting thing to work on  because frankly you couldn't go wrong everyone hated them but people were totally given up on it so it seemed like how would you go wrong for trying to do something something here and and they were definitely very interesting and i looked at the literature and it turned out we really didn't know very much about them and we started no one had bothered to measure how many were in the lakes talk a little bit no one had bothered to measure like where the young were where they moved how old they lived enough and so people didn't even know what they were trying to do when they were trying to control these things we did know they were very for kind and we have counted it here and confirmed that a single female common carp can have up to three million eggs a single fish and they can spawn every year but this is really similar the again the saga with the asian and silver car we knew they could migrate long distances the volga they migrate a couple hundred miles every year apparently but when you look at the data no one knew would ever no one even bother to see what happened to all those eggs or those larvae or those young fish and clearly i reasoned frankly as that other people something was happening because the lakes would be solid carp of everyone survived couldn't all be surviving in the same arguments are going on right now with a silver carp in the river we also knew and this is data we collected in minnesota they grow remarkably quickly so within a year these things go from a tiny egg just about a thirty second inch across to maybe six to nine inches across which is beyond the gape size of any native predator remarkable feat for a fish so clearly they're very very efficient to me as a fish physiology is this is amazing you know this isn't a remarkable animal parade in every frog pike in there and it was ever known but it ten when she was stocking king's fisher she was already a bruiser and it goes on and on and poor benson died of a surfeit of tired us which is a special type of attract use for a carp so they knew they were very old and benson could be age because bands and they've been caught dozens of time in that pond and benson was dozens of years old so we knew that they could live to be very old so produce a lot of eggs with a very long time grow very fast it sounds pretty formidable and then another really interesting thing about common carp which we still haven't really figured out which is very interesting is that they eat on the bottom and almost everything on the bottom and what's really interesting about them and i just glued to it here is that the way they eat isn't simple at all because the entire their mouse if you would open this up is like a giant tongue so they're able to actually clean out they able to dig into the bottom almost a foot down as a matter of fact no native fish can do anything like this and then pick out tiny tiny particles that they then sieve through their mouth actually using their taste systems it's a very extremely sophisticated system they can type pick out tiny tiny particles and interesting lee the silver carp in the mississippi river has a very similar capability except it's using it to filter feed so they're doing something very specialized and of course it works very well because they grow incredibly quickly and this is the problem with the car because once they get very abundant and they're digging in the bottom picking up these tiny particles in the amazing way that they do the problem is they start up rooting plants and if they are proved plants they remove you know habitat for other fish and it's all plankton and so forth that they eat things in the lake they  nutrients and they go on and they just create a terrible mess as they get more and more abundant and this leads to problems and i'll show you just a couple sides of that and this is what people started noticing your great great grandparents perhaps in their early nine hundred six point started disappearing wholesale across the hundreds of thousands of acres in the u s and i can tell you there are hundreds of thousands of acres that still don't have plants and productive systems for water fell because of that this is a lake in chicago that we happened to study that the carp got into and you could see i guess and if i go back or not but basically this is all plants in this lake here the carp got in the population exploded and then they flew over it a couple  years later and you can see is just totally cleaned out it was just totally wiped out incredibly productive wetlands for water followed by chicago native plants made official also disappear and this is an observation from wisconsin  hundred twenty nine notice there is no vegetation the lake not a single plant and you probably know many lakes like that in this area and i would submit that you know part of the problem of course is nutrients that part of it's the carp and we've been living this for so long we don't even know what the natural state of these things are and here's an example of what happens with carp this is lake winter i just outside of madison wisconsin and they actually put a carpets closure outside of this and we've been doing some of this work or selves and you know the so you move the car and the lake clears up though this is confounded a little bit by the fact there's no waves and so forth but carp have dramatic affects and entire lakes and they have now for oh i guess what ever that number is one hundred forty years going on there so your grandparents didn't even know what lake a healthy chalet looks like in the state of minnesota this is a very severe problem so we started working on this with the help of the lottery money i guess it was two thousand and six and up if you haven't still with me there's oh when there's one killed and we realized we thought well maybe we can do we could develop economically and ecologically sound progress for common carp and state in minnesota how could it go wrong everyone else a totally given up and what we realized nobody even know how many there were what kind of damage they were doing and they didn't know that how the heck were they ever going to control in the first place so we started on this some time ago and i'm not going to talk very much about it but we actually started in the west michel these are some of our study wakes and we're still looking at some of these leaks here and i'm just going to summarize it briefly because this is what we found in some of the things we found was that carp were moving between lakes through tiny creeks with great abundance and that they would cost or sometimes in the winter and we noticed th that when we did find young carp and it was a very rare event an interesting way it's a very well air a vent for the asian carp of the mississippi river right now to when we did find them they were always in these very weird kind of places shallow wetlands and so forth which is this huge expanse of wetlands and interconnected lakes and and what shell lakes and so in flood plains that maybe they've evolved a life history in which they move from deeper waters every spring to sh places which are less stable and have fewer predatory fish where they have their young and the young came back and we developed this hypothesis of a our refuge system in which see no native fish does this in other little bit more of this because we saw this play out locally here too so our tentative conclusions when we arrived here at this watershed in this area in two thousand and nine was a carper abundant and cause great damage to many hundreds if not thousands of lakes across the state of minnesota they have for a century and i would still say they're our worst aquatic invasive species frankly also thought their abundance could probably be explained by the tendency of adults to move into shallow the grad systems that function as nurseries and then that they claim these places for their own in the young leave but we imagine that if these nurseries which by and large seem to be neglected areas could be controlled and improved maybe we could we could also control the car and that was kind of the the some ation so we arrived here then i guess it was two thousand and nine now just locally here where we're right up here right now and will ache in this is what the system looks like  not that different east metro west metro basically connected lakes and but we're wondering what was the carpet situation here and we're very fortunate that ramsey washington took a chance  us and agreed to find us at that time so we started out just answering some basic questions we wanted to know about the seasonal distribution of these carp and how many there were because no one had any idea and then we also had this idea that the reason why not just show you some of this data this is kind of actually in some ways a synopsis of the last five years of research in this boat in this watershed we also wondered we were wondering if the reason why the common carp were so abundant in the shallow wetlands was because there weren't native fish there for one reason or another but if they were there that they might be able to control the recruitment or the production of young so i had a post doc at the time critias in ski who did this work and i'll show you some of his work that got us started it was pretty interesting and a little bit of work from a master student justin just and saber cyber nagle and chris schoen right here everyone has to get their picture with the car he's now down in nebraska basically started a radio tracking carp across the watershed here and what he found was that in the summer the carp so here's lake failon keller  jarvis and coleman and what he found was that in the summer they're distributed everywhere these are all individuals but interestingly we didn't go into failing that winter but interestingly all the cart from keller and most from coleman went over to jarvis so they were all aggregating and i didn't really point this out before but they form these really intense aggregations in and the deeper lakes so they migrated out only to disperse again in the summer so this was important for two reasons because  told us that they were moving in sort of predictable ways that were some distance but also that this was essentially one population these weren't three separate lakes but one watershed and the carp knew it and they were using the whole thing and i'll show you some of data at the end that shows you even more interesting lee how this whole system ties together chris also found just very briefly this is kind of a messy plot but that the car aggressively moving out of coleman through this system here here's markham lake and then casey lake appear but they're moving up through here and they the adults would move through these tiny passages out of lake coleman and we didn't know where they were going at the time but we saw that they were moving and we started to figure out at that point with bill bartos how many were here and i realize now you know you kind of figured these things out but the way we did this was we went to areas where these radio tag fish were in the winter because we knew they aggregated this is called the judas fish tank and he were trying to apply that now to the big headed carp and we caught them and the first year of my goodness we must have caught three quarters of the carp in the wake and it was just so easy it was great and we caught them all and then we did the saying that a scientist always does they mark him in measurement and they let him go and i remember bill that was so upset he said  why do you do that you let them all go if they don't worry we'll get them again but that you know we got most of them back but it took us years to get them all back but the first time always seems to be the easiest which is interesting story because we now think they actually learn about the nets and so forth and we also kept about one hundred for aging and i'll show you that data in a second but by letting them go and put a marker this is how you have to do it if by you don't know how many in the lake so if you catch them and mark them a let them go and recapture them you can look at the relative number of marked on marked and the total number you call it you can do the math you can figure out how many are there it's about the only way of doing it otherwise it's essentially in on calculable mel and that's really if you're going to control anything you've got to know how many are there enter estimates were basically the final estimates were something like this and i guess i could have done the math assumes six but seven or eight thousand carp throughout the entire system with bio masses of this could be pounds per acre i can tell you those values were about two to three times values we knew from other locations to be extremely damaging to the ecosystem so there were an awful lot of carp out throughout the failing chain maybe two to three times what you needed there were thousands of them and the other very interesting thing was in this is just teams data and this is what we call an age structure of the  and this is just showing you the relative number you see in an age look how old they are they were well into their sixty's big monsters older than me even and they know it's remarkable so and then also you can do one to watch from this because another thing that came out here was that many many years of production of young was extremely low you see what here's a blank here's a low number so the peak years for some reason there were some lakes we only see one or two peak years which is very interesting we didn't see that here but we could see that the carp were extremely old the average was probably forty or fifty years old so there's a good side  that because that means if you got them out you solve the problem fifty years maybe right you can look at it that way so interesting fish i mean perch and wall and so forth don't listen anywhere near that age so something different is going on with these fish and then we started this search or christe it here for the young and this is key if you're going to control anything because it's like a sinking boat if there's a bad leak i don't care how fast your bale we get the adults out of the yarn are pouring in it's idiotic and we look everywhere for young carp we could find the big ones all throughout the system using a system called trap netting and eventually we had  and once again just like in the west metro they're no better out there they're young carp are all in these little little wetland areas and there were actually all shoes some remarkable numbers in a minute how abundant they were in that particular year they were up here and we'll make as well but they were not the blue means that we couldn't catch any i mean not one not one up here there are hundreds per net so it was boom or bust there was no in between with this animal it's like all or nothing it's all in or it's not and that's pretty typical how there but in sar are going to come back to that one more second and we started wondering this is just in here a little bit so why is that are there so many surviving up here and none down here and as i said before we were wondering a little bit if maybe the eggs weren't being preyed upon by native fish in the lakes if there weren't enough native fish now some of you might be now bill in the watershed district since we've done this have started major restoration work in k c for instance and i think now we're working a market which is great but at the time we started up there it was just you know really basically a carp so just in here to test this hypothesis about why they were carp appeared and here we actually started watching for a dog carp with the new one and he does fall behind the  police are eggs by the millions you can do the math actually if there are three things there were three thousand carp in the lake charges when we started this work that would mean you could do the math three billion eggs are really a couple billion eggs are released every year watt eggs and then he started falling behind these to see what happened to the eggs and that got very interesting because unlike our which has a pretty healthy fishery and a lot of sun fish and other small fish we saw all these carp spawning there were always adults but all the eggs disappeared within three days and we knew they took a we figured out it took five days to hatch and sure enough we found them all in the in the stomachs of the young sunfish that lived in that way so the fish they were just going around like vacuum cleaners grabbing every single egg that was released i mean perfectly every single one which is pretty remarkable and of course that comes that i feel like to say sometimes no cost to taxpayers that's a freebie ok there's invasive species you don't always get it so easy but you did there well in k c and we never published this because we didn't have much data but the the eggs actually survived to hatch there weren't enough native fish up there to do anything about it and that's why we think there are so many carp now the question is how many carp were there this is kind of a crummy picture i don't have a good picture of jake for some reason and i asked jake to figure out ok so we know they're being produced up here and they don't seem to be there spawning everywhere they'd also are everywhere and by the way they're trying to go up here but they don't seem to be any and the young are being produced up here but  down here we can't find any so i asked jake to figure out how many there were and i he thought it sounded pretty easy give us masters done at no time and it really wasn't because when he went up to lake k c lo and behold he found actually somewhere in the order of that particular year almost ten eleven thousand young carp the entire population of the maine chain away the juvenile population could be found up there and in markham it was even worse almost thirty four thousand nine hundred young carp were found in that one neglected some of you may know that those places i'm sure that no one really cared about  obvious reasons it's not nice to swim there is not good to fish there but you know what the carpet loved it they outsmarted vehicles they're all up they're breeding like crazy well this guy bill really excited you know as you might imagine if you know bill he wanted to do something about it we've done something about it since so there's a remarkable numbers of young car being produced in these cool places that the watershed district really hadn't considered too much because people don't use them but the  and the eggs were often surviving up there and then eventually you would think they were corrected work their way down and that would became just teens these are the tell you a little bit about that in a second but the interesting thing to note here just remember these female carp they they mature at about three or four years of age i showed you the data they can live to be about sixty and they produce one to three million eggs a year so how often they have to succeed at that strategy once in a lifetime how often does a manager change hands in the failing chain every few years so they're like way ahead of us here they got us all they got is all be right they're working different kind of spatial scales and temporal scales than native fish and native fish managers are around here so that's kind of what it was so we kind of think we started figuring out this was when the watershed thankfully renewed our grand i'll tell you a little bit about it that what was going on it seemed that a lot of really old carp in the main chain failon keller jarvis and coleman and tens of thousands in these little tiny outlets we didn't know how well connected they were so you know being a scientist you always have to prove stuff to yourself so that became just teen thesis and she's back there i can let her do that part of the talk but just to see did they connected they really make it from those little ponds down to the main lakes and i'll give you some evidence about how they make it and then dan's job was basically to figure out if we could stop this in some way because this isn't so easy particularly in a day like today when there are massive floods and water going and you have to be pretty good at it pretty reasonable anyway because after all these fish only have to be successful once every ten years or twenty years or something like that  and then we wondered if and just got involved with this can we control the adults with removal in the main lakes and drawdowns there's just dean and there's her companion reed who didn't make it today i don't think but  team has been then for the last couple years trying to figure out did the carp that jake discovered up here are they making it out here and she's done this in two ways one is to track them using these tiny pit tags which are like these things you put in your dog or cat and when they when they pass through in ten it registers and i can go into that too much but we i don't know how many tag thousand or something few thousand up in these places  which sounds like a lot but remember the the numbers games these carp are playing they're pretty heavy duty so anyway just team did that and actually she found some evidence of the movement which you know it's not a lot of fish weigh so and the other interesting thing i did want to i just want to give you guys sort of an overview of how much we've learned to your generosity and hoping this word through your lakes here just tina hope by we also started looking at then not only the physical bodies moving out but the genetics of these individuals and actually was aware you know as you may know there are different stocks of fish there's different types of like cutthroat trout and things like that so why not carp so we wondered if maybe there are different stocks of carp in your lakes here and i don't think anyone's really done that before i was a little bit of work in australia about that and that's not that's not read that's bred to used to work with us but we shocked all these lakes here and collected the samples and then we did d n a analysis on it and to see if we could recognise family winnie agers and their results are really quite amazing because what became evident pretty quickly was that we had two major stocks of genetic stocks two different families of carp basically just in this city as a lakeside here one which justin is calling a which dominates up here and basically if you went up to k c you're so forth the they dom of the black here is dominant up here and as you work your way down you catch fish you see it slowly disappears into your lake phailin they're hardly any there isn't that really interesting and then the other family becomes more prevalent in its stead and we didn't find quite the source but there were these two mixtures and there were some hybrids but not many so there's two very different families of carp living in in the in the lakes and this became particularly evident i hope this isn't last year's data but it may be just seen just sent me a lot of slides but when justin then broke this data out into these two different families the a family will just call him the b family it turned out they were two different age groups so what do you think happened in that in the younger of the in the main lakes  basically their different group than in the in the older wakes and so it's probably happened here is that in just being can tell you the argument actually interesting leigh when we start picking up the first family from the coleman creek lineage was when markham pond was dug out so it appears that inadvertently when that part of the watershed was restored to obviously totally inadvertently for storm water retention they created a current nursery and a whole family of carp basically moved in from somewhere and it started to take over the lakes ok and then there's a typo and the before that though there was another family a fish a little family feud or something and actually just seen things but we can't prove that it probably came from the jar from the jarvis creek area which is since been basically destroyed by because of highway construction but this all winds up with the idea that the carper sort of filtering out of these headwater lakes headwater ponds really in drainage ditches and then infiltrating the whole lake in there that's the way they're going down because if i was to back up again you would see the oldest and the further down the chain you see a different genetic lineage than up above and then even more interesting perhaps i'm not going to show the data is that when just caught these fish in different parts of the lake she had evidence of homing that just like salmon they're going home so only the a group went up to here and they be hoops upon somewhere else so those fish they know where they are they live to be old they're pretty smart and they're playing some really interesting games with their heads here because they're they're not at all doing random stupid things like a lot of people thought they were they're actually doing some pretty smart things going up these creeks which everybody ignored spawning words every know where no one thought anyone cared about anything having all the young and in seeking back under i mean that's basically the way i look at it and they knew where they were the whole time and i'm just going to throw this in a little bit we also suspecting this we were wondering what we might do to prevent these carp from actually getting out and this is dan who just finished his ph d and this was sort of this is a very interesting exercise in dan actually built the first ever air curtain to try and prevent these carp from getting out and the promise of this is that you could build well it cost about twenty thousand dollars so it's not that expensive as far as fish barriers go not compared to the thirteen million dollar barrier the state is now considering for a four dam in the mississippi river for asian carp this is peanuts and a graduate student could build it in the lab which we did we basically built it ourselves put it out there and then actually tested the thing across here and to see if we could hold back the young carp and the idea was to do it pretty cheaply and actually it works pretty well with sixty or seventy percent success so here's the control they only moved out at night again they're pretty sneaky these fish they're not just doing any of thing you had to stay up late at night to catch them and then they were coming out at night and the air curtain would hold them back you see and then i'm sorry this is the air curtain and then they would and then the next night they would come through now this was a little bit this it was it was interesting it's still a very practical way of managing fish we learned a lot from it but where this is now would be deployed is down a walk in dam number eight and we're going to put it down at the iowa border to try and keep the asian carp out which are even more sensitive sound and we figure if we can just deflect them away from the shields here from the openings of the locks i just thought maybe you'd benefit because who knows where your were your research dollars are going to go right but there's really no technology that can be implemented down there cheaply and easily and we're going to use combinations of sound that dan developed here and see if we can keep these fish out number recently optimistic about it because this is a reasonably good location so lastly i'll just talk a little bit about so i hope you know those of you that contributed i don't quite know how watersheds get their money but through water bills and so forth thank you you're going to help the entire state for that will bit of research on that on that air curtain system lastly in the past year we've kind of been we've really there's still things we don't understand about the carp here but we know why there are so many that they that that these degraded a wetlands the upper reaches that no one cared about knew about wanted anything to do with the car found them they use them so we now think that if we do something about those and restore them that that will cut off the supply of young and we also found out the aggregate in the winter so we should be able to remove them and we know what the critical number is and we know if you get them out you can buy yourself probably decades because they're very old fish and they take a long time to return so they basically we've started a management program so this is hypothetically how you might look at it there's a population of fish they're born they come in through recruitment or they die and we're going to try and like cut off recruitment here and then enhanced mortality here and here's bill was in here today but he's been working primarily on his own but with us a little bit i know symbol was out there trying to control a k c unfortunately the air barrier we didn't think was strong enough to hold back all the young carp but we figured out a way to pull down draw down casey and maybe in the future will get markham to draw down to kill off all the young carp and shut that offices supply you mean basically plug the hole in the dike or whatever you want to look at which is critical when there's so many being born up there so that's neighborhood site which would be great and then meanwhile just seen and read in the working and removal and we've been doing several things we've been doing winter saying this box i haven't really talked about of the other another trick we've we've been actually catching them as they migrate up the creek here as they're going up another thing we develop his way of tricking them because we have these baited traps we train them to come to things we don't just put out for a day but for like a week because they  patterns in the lake and they come to get it they get comfortable with it and then you can surprise them but you've got to be sort of speech about it so we've done several winter sayings now every year these aggregations get harder and harder to get and frankly i truly believe it's because they remember who we are no i do i think they understand the sounds and the noises in the nets that first year we really should the kept more than we did but we didn't know but we've been seen we always use these radio because the lakes pretty big if you just go out there randomly you're never going to get them and that's unfortunate a little bit what's happening now with big headed carp in the mississippi river with all these efforts to catch them it's totally totally random these fish are very sensitive they hear you they understand who you are they don't want to think it with you they get away you're only going to get the idiots and you know it's true and you got out you got to be a little bit ahead of them so where you were so we've been doing that we've got these radio tag fish out there and then we've been doing these box net removals and i guess we're getting the end of the talk here but we've now brought the population down to something about a maybe a third of what it  and it's still i would say you can live with a few snuffy in the world these numbers are below what we think consider to be damaging and i wouldn't say anything is forever but i think the place is a much better shape than we started and hopefully it will hang together for at least maybe ten twenty years not forever when you do it with invasive species it's always working in gray areas and making compromises and so forth and i think this was a as a good compromise so we've done that the conclusions would be i guess that the abundance of common carp and lake failon carp is a carp and that lake failon there just as many here for the same reasons we see the west metro it's because the recruitment the show how degraded interconnected lakes which sadly enough everyone's ignored but you know listen to your watershed managers about the watershed the whole water if you if you follow that philosophy you'll be able to fix these carp they can be restored to control carp we've seen this in a few locations it's i like to think of it generally as a win when you get a new body of water we had neglected storm pond or something before can control carp it's really all about balance and compromise i think not focusing on you know single lakes or single species i believe they're now saying we control i'm quite proud of what my students have done out here and i think a lot of these lessons can be applied to other invasive species and i'll just talk a little bit about that just for a second not for a long as a i know it's kind of late but i owe then the course this is where we got our money from was the watershed district and  and the environmental trust fund the the lottery money which really was great because they sort of took a chance on us and just say a little bit not too much we can do this in questions and answers if you like but i think partly because of all my students and postdocs hard work we've got probably developed a certain level of recognition the state so when when people started panicking about the asian carp a couple years who didn't who do they call right they call me down there and so i go down to the legislature and eventually fry i guess i'm proud to say they trusted us with was some additional money to start looking at other other invasive species in our objectives are to find sustainable solutions to numerous problems in the state of minnesota know we've dozens of ai s there's not there's more than we can possibly handle we're a group of about half a dozen scientists some only part time and in a straight are we have a truck and a boat and we can't do miracles but maybe if we target or efforts we're going to look for sustainable solutions that make sense over the be new tools for measurement controlled eradication this was the case with common carp you have to know how many there are pointless you have to know where they are it's pretty pointless and we'll have to course work with other groups to do that and we want to provide leading edge information to state because i think there is enormous confusion and sometimes unnecessary confusion and sometimes despondency about the situation we face with these things so the center is kind of position like this i guess the power point kind of screwed that up a little bit but where it where the nexus there are with between watershed districts that's what that's meant to say there that he in our academic institutions  guess we're not so much working on sealand break as that and what we're working on com will still work when common carp i still you know i think they'll be taking your eye off the ball they're the ones doing the damage we should be able to fix this problem or do much better with it  zebra mussels well or those are a key species and we're looking with what i just described to you would be what would be known as an integrated pest management approach using numerous tools to kind of target different life histories stages to bring it down we have seven years of funding it looks like a lot but it's not really when you've got to spread it across such a long time and so much so many things it's enough to get a bunch of people going but i like to point out that even in the case of common carpet took us more than seventy years to figure out what i described to you today took about six or seven years we started in two thousand and six and right now we're just getting the point where i'm starting to feel pretty comfortable that if we work in the watershed destruction as mean as just teens going to do soon give us a few years we can start to diagnose the problem so this isn't going to be a cure but it's a start and hopefully it's a pa welling people today to deal with these things and i'd be happy to answer detailed questions about what we're going to be doing and so forth but i didn't want to go on forever i want a chance to talk with people answer question so thank you very much and thank you for your support and i hope i ask if you have any questions i'd be happy to answer them yeah know what you need to do and we may continue to work i would like to continue to work well i'll help you out no matter what that's at it but you know i think we're now talking with the with you should continue to monitor just when you go to a doctor you know i mean basically the system sick there is a disease there it's at some level you've got to make sure the things don't go what we're hoping to do actually is to create a new job for somebody at the university that can work with watersheds to do this because it's pretty specialized work it's not what the d n r typically would have time or the ability to do nor what a watershed to do so actually in a couple days i'm going to meet with a group of watershed districts and see if we can find a position like that one one one one step at a time so we'll kind of work at it is as is practical can't do everything but if watershed distil like ramsey washington is very interested i think the great i want to get the information out there i want to help people and i want to do good things with it and i want to train people the university too because education is really important there's a lot to be done oh well what the navy is storing is actually quite different than what we're doing they actually are detonating significant explosive devices to drive seismic waves thousands of kilometers i mean they're measuring things long way away but the ocean's big but i mean we're not doing anything near on that scale and the reason it's affecting those marine may i guess i follow that stuff a little bit anyway is that it's damaging interview year and the fish don't have that kind of inner ear and so forth so i really don't think that that is concerned there may be some concern with facts of these the sound that we're go produce on some of the other native most fish are pretty tone deaf frankly most of the native fish but things like catfish aren't so they may be affected the issue really is that once in terms of the asian carp is that once they get here and i know this really well from casey as you know simba here you know how hard it is to extirpate a group of fish once they're there and reproducing it's almost impossible and once they get in and i just don't know what we're going to do so we can just hold them back a little while and figure this out so i don't do this necessary a permanent or the perfect solution is just buying it buying us time because honestly if they stay there will be like common carp once they're in the open the sippy river i just don't oh i mean it could be decades before you get them out easy so that's you know they were they were this is this incident down the south part of the state you probably read of and they were it was just announced middle of march that asian carp eggs were found just i think eight miles downstream of minnesota border i don't know why it took them so long to announce a but all of a sudden it's like ok they're here better do something so that's my response is to do something and is just regarded as a temporary measure