Goal is to take 30M lbs. of carp from Utah Lake

PROVO — Over the next six years, the June Sucker Recovery Implementation Program is hoping to remove 30 million pounds of carp from Utah Lake.

That's about 58 million carp — enough to fill a football field 70 feet deep in fish, said Reed Harris, the program's director.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Thursday its support of the removal and is offering to pay $1 million of the $1.5 million it will take to remove the first batch of 5 million pounds of carp to be removed throughout 2010, Harris said.

Harris said lake officials hope to take out 5 million pounds of carp annually over the next several years, and with the extra funding for next year, that number looks possible.

Before taking the idea to the federal government last spring, he said, there was a pilot removal study conducted over four months during which 1 million pounds of carp were removed.

The June Sucker Recovery Implementation Program has removed another 710,000 pounds in just the past two months.

Carp were introduced to the lake in 1890 and since then have overtaken the lake.

Harris said the carp removal won't just help take the June sucker off the endangered species list, but it could start changing the look of Utah Lake within the next year.

Michael Mills, the program's local coordinator, said the carp have caused a loss of water clarity and loss of biodiversity.

"Through their feeding behavior, they removed the majority of the aquatic vegetation from the lake and really changed the lake into the state that we see it in now," Mills said.

By removing 75 percent to 80 percent of the carp 2 years and older over the next six years, the program aims to reverse some of the negative affects on the lake due to the carp, Harris said. But one question he is still figuring out is what to do with all of the fish after they have been removed.

Harris' team is looking at using the carp as fertilizer, mink food or fish meal, but one of the problems with harvesting 40,000 to 100,000 pounds of fish a day, is that workers can only process so many fish. Harris said program managers are working to find a better way to streamline the process or possibly hold or freeze the fish for later use. That would also help recoup some of the cost of harvesting the fish, he said.

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