Carpageddon: Will it work?
- Details
- Date: Thursday, 19 December 2019
- Submitted by Anthony Heiser
If you're a Carp swimming in the murky waters of Lake Burley Griffin this festive season, should you be worried that you might not live to see another Christmas? Presumably, you may have heard about the oncoming Carpageddon. However, as we wait for the National Carp Control Plan to present its recommendations to the Government, the Carp must be wondering if there is any truth to Carpageddon, or just end up being just another failed doomsday prophecy.
If Carpageddon is the prophecy, then the prophet is Barnaby Joyce, whose response to a Dorothy Dixer from fellow National Party MP Kevin Hogan MP resulted in one of the more colourful speeches seen in Parliament:
We are afflicted with these disgusting, mud-sucking creatures—bottom-dwelling, mud-sucking creatures. The only form of control is a version of herpes; it is the only thing that will get rid of these disgusting, mud-sucking creatures. We will move forward on this because we believe that we should be getting rid of these disgusting, mud-sucking creatures in order to support some of the better animals of our waterways—the silver perch, the yellowbelly, the Murray cod, the Eastern cod and the catfish. We do not want to deal with carp; we have to get rid of the carp. When we have dealt with this virus, we are going to have between 500,000 and two million tonnes of carp.
It would be interesting to unpack this entire statement, but let's focus on three key claims:
- the CyHV3 virus is the only option to get rid of the Carp
- we will have 500,000 to 2 million tonnes of dead Carp, and
- the waterways will better support other animals including native fish.
