MIKE BRAUN A shocking development: no bighead carp in Glacier

Apparently, the reign of the bighead carp in Lake Glacier is over.
Electroshocking of the lake conducted by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife last week gave Glacier a clean bill of health.
The bighead carp issue developed in July after an angler fishing in Mill Creek Park discovered a large, decomposing fish floating along Glacier's shoreline.
Fish biologists from the DOW checked scale samples from the fish and concluded that it was a member of the Asian carp family, likely a bighead carp.
Local assertion
Shortly after that discovery, Wendell Jones of Boardman said that the dead, 51-inch-long fish was probably one of four he bought in the mid-1980s and placed in a lake he built along a tributary creek of the Mill Creek watershed.
Jones said a torrential rain caused the lake to be breached in the early 1990s and the fish escaped.
He said that they probably made their way downstream and eventually into the park's lakes.
Matt Wolfe, a DOW fish biologist, said that it was likely the fish were placed in Glacier as there were no other recorded instances of this species so far up the watershed.
Shocking survey
The DOW was concerned enough about the bighead -- brought to the United States from Asia in the early 1970s as a means of controlling aquatic weeds and released into the wild mistakenly via a flood -- that they decided conduct an electroshocking survey of Glacier.
Phil Hillman, a fisheries biologist at the DOW District Three office in Akron, said the survey Wednesday did find a number of fish in Glacier.
"We found oodles and oodles of 12- to 15-inch common carp, we found some bluegills, some largemouth bass, white crappie, white suckers and some yellow bullhead [catfish]," Hillman said.
"We did the whole shoreline with two electroshocking boats," Hillman explained, adding that the two boats also checked the middle of the lake and found no bighead carp evidence.
"We found none," he said. "That's the end of the story."
Hillman doubted that the fish found in Glacier was linked to Jones' fish. Jones said the fish he bought were sold to him as white amur, another Asian carp species. Hillman said there was no way to confirm that now.
"We still have no idea where [the Glacier bighead] came from," he said. "It's a freak thing and troubling."
He said human intervention is the likely culprit: "That is what will cause a problem."
Hillman said that if you catch a fish and it is something so unusual or strange that you can't identify it, "don't put it back into the water."
He said the spread of invasive species such as the bighead or zebra mussels must be stopped.
braun@vindy.com