When you come visit Washington, DC bring your fishing pole, the Potomac River is being taken over by snakeheads.
Snakeheads everywhere - Washington Times
The northern snakehead, a tooth-laden, exotic creature dubbed Frankenfish by fright-happy headline writers who wouldn't know a catfish from a vacuum cleaner, now is being increasingly seen on the business end of fishing lures by bass anglers from below Great Falls to Virginia's Aquia Creek - a long stretch of river.
Why bass fishermen? Like a bass, the snakeskin-patterned foreign invader apparently is occasionally fooled by the same artificial lures, believing them to be food.
But what was once confined to Little Hunting Creek - subsequently and in larger numbers also in Dogue Creek, a broad water area on the Virginia side of the Potomac - now is making its presence felt up and down the waterway and no one really has any ideas how to stop it. Federal and state fisheries officials have ruled that the snakehead cannot be released after being caught. It must be killed, then disposed of on dry land (not in water), put into a trash can or such.
Prince George's County bass boaters Bob Troup and Steve Hawks not long ago caught young snakeheads on topwater lures inside Maryland's Pomonkey Creek, followed by a snakehead catch in the back of the Piscataway creek.
On a recent Tuesday, I spotted a Maryland Department of Natural Resources electro-shock boat crew in the Mattawoman Creek and asked what they were doing. DNR biologist Tim Groves said, "We're looking for snakeheads, and we're finding them." (The DNR electro-shock team lately has managed to get at least 10 snakeheads every day.)
Scientists say snakehead's impact still hard to judge - Washington Times
The snakehead's roe floats in the water and - if the water is suitably warm - can hatch within 30 hours. Once hatched, a 3/4-inch long fry is capable of feeding on tiny crustaceans and fish larvae. The snakehead also is an obligate air breather. It can survive in oxygen-depleted water by rising to the surface and inhaling air and can survive several days without water as long as it remains moist. Most of the scientists who have worked with the snakehead species agree it is too early to make a judgment regarding the snakehead's impact on the waters it has been introduced in, but these fish are predators and will compete with native predatory species for food.
While juvenile snakeheads eat insect larvae, small crustaceans, zooplankton, even the fry of other fish species, the adult snakehead feeds mostly on other fish, as long as they're smaller and the prey fits into its mouth, but frogs, crayfish, water snakes, even young muskrats and birds can become part of their diet. Typical snakehead habitat includes ponds, swamps, slow-moving muddy streams and tidal feeder creek shallows
