Thursday » December 20 » 2007
Vicious fish feared headed for Great Lakes
The snakehead has teeth that can bite off a man's hand
Sharon Hill
CanWest News Service
Thursday, December 20, 2007
WINDSOR, Ont. -- The ever-hungry northern snakehead, which has been dubbed Frankenfish and Fishzilla, is one of the two most feared invasive fish that could get into the Great Lakes, a biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada said Wednesday.
"These things are just vicious," said Becky Cudmore, manager of the Centre of Expertise for Aquatic Risk Assessment in Burlington, Ont.
The snakehead has become a popular YouTube subject, with a National Geographic YouTube video added within the last month.
One look at that video shows why it would make a mess of the Great Lakes.
One man on the video warns they can bite your entire hand off. A U.S. official warns they can decimate the aquatic food chain.
And they could settle comfortably into Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair, which Cudmore says would be ideal habitats for the northern snakehead.
The fish can reach 1.8 metres, can survive out of water for four days and has a mouth full of teeth that can shear fish in half, the biologist said. The snakehead can even eat ducks and small mammals.
"It gets such huge sizes. It moves over land and it breathes air and it will eat anything it comes into contact with.
"That's what freaks people out about it, to see a fish moving across land gulping air."
There are many species of snakeheads but the northern snakehead was found in 2002 in a Maryland pond.
Those were later killed, but the snakeheads are also found in the Potomac River in Maryland and Virginia.
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
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