Crofton Pond Snakehead Fish Incident
Crofton was in the national news in late June and early July 2002 after a Northern Snakehead fish was discovered in a pond behind the Crofton post office (not the local landmark Lake Louise, but instead across Route 3 from it).
The snakehead species, which is highly aggressive, voracious, and can walk short distances on land, came from a live Asian food market, where the fish is a delicacy. In order to ensure that the fish were eliminated, the pond was dosed heavily with rotenone, and subsequently with potassium permanganate (September 17, 2002). Six adult snakeheads and more than one thousand juvenile fish were found and destroyed.
Ultimately, the incident initiated a national discussion on invasive species and comparisons with the mute swan, also an invasive and destructive species of the Chesapeake Bay watershed but, in comparison, quite beautiful, and which garnered support from some environmental and animal rights groups.
There have been several movies inspired by this incident. The SciFi Network has aired two movies in relation to the snakehead outbreak. In March 2004, a movie called Snakehead Terror was featured, and in June 2004, the movie Frankenfish was aired. There has also been a movie produced by Ten Pound Films titled Swarm of the Snakehead which related to this incident.
In 2007, a documentary on the National Geographic Channel titled Fishzilla: Snakehead Invasion aired that discussed the ecological damage that the snakeheads found in Crofton have done to surrounding areas.
Read more about this topic: Crofton, Maryland
Famous quotes containing the words pond, fish and/or incident:
“The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water is being warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning. The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer. The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Here’s a fish hangs in the net like a poor man’s right in the law; ‘twill hardly come out.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)