Branson Williams feels the weight of his responsibilities. The 39-year-old Marylander is tasked with defeating an elusive and relentless enemy that shows no signs of weakening.
Failure in this war is not an option. But a complete and convincing victory is unlikely.
“I stay up late at night thinking about this,” Williams says. “Eradication is not possible at this point. Their abundance and densities are way too great. What we do hope is that we can prevent further spread.”
The menace causing Williams to lose sleep? Fish.
Advertisement
Specifically, he worries about blue and flathead catfish and northern snakehead, the terrible trio of invasive fish that has been wreaking environmental havoc in Maryland waters for decades.
The fish are responsible, state officials say, for feasting on native species, reducing their numbers and altering the entire ecosystem. The total catches of hard blue crab, rockfish (also known as striped bass), yellow perch and other native Maryland species have declined between 27 percent and 91 percent since 2012, according to the state. The invasives’ rampage through the region has been so devastating that last year Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) asked the federal government to declare a commercial fishing disaster in the Maryland waters of the Chesapeake Bay.
Faced with potentially dire consequences, Maryland is bumping up its counteroffensive. Williams, who last year became the first invasive fishes program manager for Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, manages several efforts to track the invasive population and keep it under control. One approach has shown promise: encouraging Marylanders to consume catfish and snakehead (despite the unappetizing name.)
“If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em” may prove to be the most effective strategy.
Rapacious — but tasty — predators
On a hot Saturday last month, Williams traveled to Gunpowder Falls State Park, northeast of Baltimore, for the Snakes on the Dundee fishing derby. The annual event is one of several supported by state and federal partners to encourage the harvest of snakehead and educate the public about the damage they are causing. Anglers are given tips on the best way to catch the fish, including bowfishing demonstrations and suggestions for which lures and methods are most successful.
But catching the fish was just one component of the day. Teaching people how to prepare the fish and encouraging them to eat them was just as important.
So Williams, who grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and has fished all of his life, spent part of his day wearing a fluorescent orange fishing bib while demonstrating how to best fillet snakehead. A crowd of anglers murmured in admiration as he slid his knife from the slimy fish’s tail to its head to separate the filet from the skin and held it up triumphantly.
Then it was time to eat. Smoke from a nearby barbecue drifted in the air as volunteers grilled snakehead dusted with Old Bay seasoning — Maryland’s unofficial spice — and handed out samples. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive.
“Better than rockfish,” said Darrin Hoiland, 41, of Edgewood, who won the day’s derby by hooking a 12.7-pound snakehead.
Blue catfish, introduced to the Chesapeake Bay watershed in the 1970s, reproduce at an exponential rate, enjoy long life spans and eat almost anything. With few predators, they have thrived in the Chesapeake and are spreading into new waters at a rapid pace. Northern snakeheads, native to China, were first spotted in Maryland in 2002 in a pond in Crofton. They too have developed a reputation as rapacious predators, though perhaps not quite as destructive as blue catfish.
Advertisement
For years now, Maryland has placed no limits on how many invasive fish can be caught. Hoping to contain their spread, the state encourages anglers to kill rather than catch-and-release any northern snakehead, blue catfish or flathead catfish. Maryland also made it illegal to introduce the three invasive fish into state waters and set fines of up to $2,500 for violators.
Despite all of the containment efforts, the reach of the invasives continued to expand. Northern snakehead, already plentiful in eastern Maryland waterways, has been caught as far west as Frederick and the extreme edge of Montgomery County. Blue catfish appear unstoppable. More and more, it looks like Maryland may have to eat itself out of this mess. And there are encouraging signs that could happen.
Creating an appetite
Matthew Scales, seafood marketing director for the Maryland Department of Agriculture (and, yes, he’s heard all of the jokes about his name), says that when people try blue catfish, they are pleasantly surprised and compare it to striped bass. But Scales knows that catfish have a reputation as bottom-feeders, so he isn’t above gussying up their image.
“Any time we’re talking about blue catfish, I kind of try to rebrand it a little bit,” Scales said. “I say ‘wild-caught Chesapeake blue catfish.’ So we’re differentiating ourselves between farmed and wild-caught. And then we’re putting ‘Chesapeake’ in there so folks know this is not coming from the South, it’s coming from the Chesapeake Bay.”
Growing a consumer market for the blue catfish has encouraged more fishing over the past decade. About 700,000 pounds of blue catfish from Maryland waters and the Potomac River were landed in 2013 by commercial fishing operations. Last year, that number leapt to over 4 million pounds, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
State agencies have encouraged the region’s restaurants and grocery stores to offer blue catfish and snakehead. The state recently partnered with Fish and Hunt Maryland to create the Catfish Trail, a collection of efforts aimed at combating invasive fish in Maryland waters. And last month, Maryland’s Department of Agriculture released a list of restaurants and retail stores offering blue catfish.
Maryland has also renamed the northern snakehead as Chesapeake Channa, hoping it will encourage people to eat more of the fish. (“Channa” is the snakehead’s genus name.) In his letter introducing a bill to change the name this year, Maryland Del. Todd B. Morgan (R-St. Mary’s) laid out the issue succinctly:
“The crux of this is we have a public relations problem,” Morgan wrote. “Watermen want to catch these fish, restaurants want to sell them, and environmental experts want the fish gone. The big roadblock to all of this is the lack of consumer interest in eating the fish. It tastes great, makes delicious fillets, and is considered a delicacy in many parts of the world. However, most people can’t get past the name of the fish — nobody wants to eat a fish named the Snakehead!”
But not everyone is a fan of the new moniker, including derby winner Hoiland, who estimated he had caught about 150 pounds of snakehead in the past month.
“Changing the name is not going to help, because the name they want to change it to sounds stupid,” Hoiland said.
Advertisement
‘Reel Rewards’
Government agencies aren’t the only ones making Marylanders aware of the growing threat moving through their state’s waters. In Baltimore, a community environmental organization is paying cash for the heads of invasive fish. Reel Rewards, a project of the Environmental Justice Journalism Initiative, provides anglers $30 bounties for each northern snakehead, blue catfish and flathead catfish they drop off at twice-weekly collections.
This is the first year for the Reel Rewards project, but the results have been promising, said Donzell Brown, EJJI’s executive director. The project has collected 384 fish since May. In addition to helping remove invasive fish from the Patapsco River, the project seeks to engage residents of the nearby working-class and lower-income neighborhoods.
It “increases awareness of environmental issues in a community that isn’t used to being involved personally,” said Veronica Malabanan Lucchese, 27, EJJI’s environmental science program manager and a doctoral student at the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science. “We’re compensating anglers for their time and they are helping restore the native habitat.”
On a Wednesday evening last month, Christopher Taylor pulled his truck into a Baltimore parking lot on the edge of the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River to collect the bounty for the fish he had caught. From the back he hauled a large blue cooler and lugged it over to a pop-up tent staffed by Reel Rewards volunteers.
Taylor, 33, opened his cooler to reveal the heads of about 25 snakeheads and blue catfish resting on ice. Water and slime dripped from the fish as the volunteers put them in zip-top plastic bags to be counted and tracked. Participants in the program take photos of the fish when they catch them and provide a geolocation through an app that helps monitor where they were found.
On the snakehead invasion, Taylor doesn’t think much can be done at this point. He says bowfishing snakehead is never a challenge because there are so many of them.
“They’re here to stay, honestly,” he said. “I can shoot 50 in one spot, go back the next day and shoot another 50. It’s not hard.” Since early March, he said, he has caught about 500 snakeheads.
But Taylor, who sells snakeheads and blue catfish to local restaurants and markets, does see consumption growing. He, too, thinks snakehead tastes better than rockfish and recommends grilling it with butter and Old Bay seasoning.
“There’s no fishy taste or smell,” Taylor said. “If you’ve never had it before, try it. You’ll love it.”
Those words are music to the ears of Maryland officials like Williams who hope a growing appetite for invasive fish will diminish their threat to the Chesapeake Bay watershed. While Williams knows it will probably be impossible to eradicate the fish, he hopes the efforts will help minimize ecological harm.
“Buying blue catfish, buying northern snakehead when you see it in the grocery or a restaurant, it does make a difference,” Williams said, noting that it supports industries that remove the fish. “That’s really our best control strategy at this point.”
correction
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Veronica Malabanan Lucchese and misidentified the Middle Branch as part of the Patuxent River. It is part of the Patapsco River. The article has been corrected. The article was also revised to clarify that Branson Williams grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLGkecydZK%2BZX2d9c4COaW5oaWhkuqK%2B2KWYp5xdnru3rdKirZ5llp7AqXnSp5iknZiarqV5wpqrn6GjnXqjuNSeZJyqkZd8