No sign of the snakehead fish in Burnaby
Posted May 23, 2012 6:16 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
BURNABY (NEWS1130) – The official search for the snakehead fish is on.
Crews from the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, and the City of Burnaby scoured Burnaby ponds today to find the voracious predator, however nothing was found.
Despite electro-shocking the lake and sweeping it several times with huge nets, nothing particularly interesting turned up, other than some turtles, an 18 lb carp, and a few golf balls.
Matthias Herborg with the Ministry of Environment says at the very least, they got a better understanding of the ponds but a lot of questions remain.
“We had a video, so the video’s from here. We don’t know if there’s one, is there 20, are there a hundred, are there juveniles?” he asks. “That’s why you have to come out and see what’s in here.”
Herborg adds they’ll be back with another plan soon. The question is now, are they’re confident they’ll find anything at all?
“It’s too early to say,” he notes. “We spent a lot of time today using methods, some of them just didn’t work. The aim for today was not so much to go and catch the fish, but figure out what will work if we want to come back and be a little more organized and a bit more targeted.”
So far, sightings of the metre-long fish that can walk on land and eat small mammals have been unconfirmed. Crews are hoping to confirm how many, if any, there are, what species they are, and if they have spread. They also hope to figure out how to capture it.
Places in the US that have struggled with snakehead fish have had to kill everything in the lake to get rid of them, but hopefully things aren’t that bad here.
