On the front page of today's Detroit Free Press, there's a scary article about ferocious killer fish from Asia which are about to invade and destroy Lake Michigan. The situation is said to be as bad as a hurricane:

Immediate action is needed to prevent a flood-prone Illinois river from releasing scores of ferocious Asian carp into Lake Michigan, where they could wreak havoc on the ecosystem of the Great Lakes and surrounding bodies of water.

The urgent threat has Congress debating a bill it could pass as early as this week, authorizing the Army Corps of Engineers to do whatever is necessary to keep the voracious fish out.

The Des Plaines River runs beside the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which has an electric barrier to stop carp from getting into the Great Lakes. The river is only 100 feet from the canal, and if it floods again as it has the past two years, carp could escape into the canal above the electric barricade.

Scientists just discovered in September that the invasive carp were so far up the river -- and so close to Lake Michigan.

"This is a natural disaster waiting to happen," said Jennifer Nalbone of Great Lakes United in Chicago. "We need to respond to it like we would respond to a hurricane."

Silver carp can grow to 80 pounds and leap out of the water, endangering boaters and anglers. They feed voraciously on the food other lake species eat, so they could destroy or drastically alter the food chain.

If carp get beyond the electric barrier, officials could use a powerful chemical to kill them. But it also would kill other fish in the area, said Phil Moy, chairman of an advisory panel on the barrier.

Sandbagging along the Des Plaines or poisoning the fish are not long-term solutions, said Marc Gaden, spokesman for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.

The Chicago canal should be fully or partially closed, he and others said Wednesday.

The canal is an important link to Lake Michigan for barges and recreational boats. The city of Chicago dumps its wastewater into it. But protecting the Great Lakes from carp and other invasive species is paramount, Gaden said.

Experts fear the fish could wipe out sport and commercial fisheries on the Great Lakes.

Great Lakes recreational fishing generates about $4.5 billion a year, according to 2002 figures from the U.S. General Accounting Office, and the most prized species are exotic salmon and trout.

Ironically, salmon were brought to Lake Michigan in the late 1960s for two reasons: to create an exciting fishing experience for vacationers and to eat the oceangoing alewives that had infested the lake.

At one time, the lake looked after itself, with big fish living off little fish like chubs, lake herring and bottom-dwelling sculpins. The lake also was home to healthy populations of yellow perch, whitefish and burbot, a cousin to the oceangoing cod.

But the system collapsed in the 1950s when overfishing, habitat degradation and the arrival of sea lamprey caused lake trout to disappear. With lake trout gone and no predator to replace it atop the food chain, alewives flourished.

By the mid-1960s, up to 90 percent of the lake's fish "biomass" was alewife. The bacon-strip-sized fish periodically died off by the billions, though, likely because of temperature swings the ocean species was not built to handle.

Beaches up and down the 307-mile-long lake were choked with mounds of rotting flesh crawling with maggots.

"You didn't even walk by the beach down in Milwaukee. It stunk awful," recalled retired DNR fishery chief Lee Kernen. "They needed bulldozers to clean them up. It was that horrible."

Looking for a more exciting alternative to trout fishing, biologists turned to Pacific salmon. Almost instantly, alewife numbers plummeted and salmon fishing exploded in popularity.

Now, the states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana engage in a delicate balancing act to keep enough alewives around to feed the salmon, but not so many that they once again dominate the lake.

The states also annually plant nonnative brown and steelhead trout, and the federal government stocks about 2 million native lake trout - a species that evolved in the lake over thousands of years but disappeared in the 1950s.

The result is a paradox, however: Politicians and conservationists tout the value of salmon as a reason to protect and restore the lake.

In Alaska they're worried about invasive Atlantic salmon, and more recently, a new threat has been discovered in the form of captive-bred native species! No, seriously. Apparently, it is evil to allow human-bred captives to breed with their wilder brethren. At least, so say the high priests of ecology:

Fish raised in large ocean pens have genetic traits that make them distinct from their wild counterparts. This has led critics of the fish farming industry to argue that farmed fish that break free - a common occurrence - might breed with native ones, perhaps compromising the health of the entire species and threatening its ability to survive in its natural setting.

Dr. Fleming says the key to avoiding this real ecological danger is to break what is normally considered a biological taboo: deliberately introducing a new species into an ecosystem.

"The real issue is a fascinating one - it's to analyze if it is actually better to be farming Atlantic salmon on the West Coast rather than farming Pacific salmon there," says Dr. Fleming. "That might be considered a heretical idea, in the sense that we would be introducing an exotic species into the Pacific, and all our knowledge of invasive species suggests that we shouldn't do that. But with salmonids, particularly Atlantic salmon, there are indications that that might not be such a bad idea."

There is an old-fashioned, man-made solution to the problem of carp. They have been aquafarmed for countless centuries for food, and they are not only a delicacy in Asia, but they're a main ingredient in Gefilte fish. Plus they're a great source of fish feed as well as Omega-3 oil.

On top of all that, they're fun to catch! Watching the video of this Redneck Carp Fishing Tournament makes me want to throw Coco in the back of my 1964 Ranchero and head for the Mississippi River!

And to wipe out the recalcitrant invaders that the rednecks can't handle, perhaps we could call in the Israelis for help. They've been breeding carp for years to supply the Gefilte fish industry, but lately their carp crop has been devastated by a virus which kills 90% of the fingerlings:

...in the last decade commercial carp breeding has been hit hard by the carp virus, which kills about 90 percent of the fish in the early stage of life. This week about four million carp fingerlings in the fish ponds of the Beit She'an Valley are being immunized against the virus, a step that Agriculture Ministry officials said Wednesday was vital to insuring sufficient supplies of the adult fish ahead of Rosh Hashanah.

Carp virus arrived in Israel in a shipment of koi fish, ornamental varieties of carp. The virus does not affect other species of fish or human beings.

Anyway, I think that if there were a concerted effort between the rednecks and the Israelis, the edible invaders wouldn't stand a chance.