Lake carp may be recycled

PROVO — Four generations ago, as the Loy family history goes, Brigham Young asked Bill Loy Jr.'s great-grandfather to harvest fish from Utah Lake to feed pioneers whose crops had been eaten by locusts.

Today, Loy is involved in another important project: getting rid of Utah Lake's carp.

Loy, a commercial fisherman, is helping the June Sucker Recovery Implementation Program, sponsored by Utah's Department of Natural Resources, by catching carp in large quantities and selling them.

The fish have overpopulated, muddying the lake and killing other species of more desirable fish and aquatic plants.

"(Carp) has a bad name," Loy said. "It's a bony fish."

Still, Loy sends regular shipments of carp to Israel, Canada and Los Angeles, among other places. One restaurant in Omaha, Neb., makes a specialty sandwich out of Utah Lake carp, with hundreds of people regularly waiting in line to sample the food, Loy said.

But with the fish's bad name and a declining market, the carp are becoming harder to sell. Loy says he used to move 3 million pounds of carp out of the lake per year, but now he doesn't have anywhere to send such a large amount of fish.

"There's a carp in just about every pond there's water in," Loy said. "Once they get established, they multiply real fast. They're a problem all over the country."

That's where Richard Kellems, a Brigham Young University animal science professor, comes in.

Kellems is working on a process that turns the unwanted carp into a useful food product. To him, throwing away the carp — a major source of protein — would be a waste of a good natural resource.

Once Kellems finds a way to turn the fish into a marketable item, he said the June Sucker Recovery Implementation Program will approach companies to sell the concept.

If the program can find other entities to remove the fish and make a profit from mass producing the fish byproduct, it could help offset costs the program would otherwise have to pay to remove the fish.

"It would be a win-win for everybody, I think," Kellems said.

Kellems has been working on the project for nine months, though he received a grant from the recovery program just four months ago.

Kellems' first step is to grind up the fish and warm them to a certain temperature. Fish have enzymes in their bodies that cause them to liquefy at certain temperatures in short periods of time.