‘Frankenfish’ caught in park lake

Frank Girardeau did not notice the signs that ban fishing in Flushing Meadows- Corona Park when he took his backpack-sized rod to the bridge connecting Willow and Meadow lakes on Wednesday, May 23.
“It’s mating season for carp and I could see them on the surface, so I cast upstream and just sort of snagged this,” he said, holding up a darkly-patterned fish the size of a man’s arm, sporting a mouthful of long, sharp teeth. “It’s one of those snakehead fish I read about,” Girardeau, an avid angler, concluded.
The several varieties of snakehead, whose scientific family name is Channa, are at the top of the food chain in their native habitat, which ranges from Iran to Siberia, and have no natural predators here. They also breathe air, so they can survive for days out of water if they stay moist. Most species can even travel over flooded land or mud.
Two years ago, northern snakeheads were first found in Meadow Lake, drawing the attention of even The New York Times. Three years earlier, state authorities in Maryland poisoned even the vegetation in a pond to eliminate five adult snakeheads and 1,000 hatchlings.
Frenzied reports of monster fish that kill everything and walk spawned a school of low-budget films with names like “Swarm of the Snakehead” and “Snakehead Terror,” but people in Queens have little to fear, according to Jim Gilmore of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).
“We’ve been monitoring the lakes in Flushing Meadows and Kissena Parks since the first reports,” Gilmore said, adding, “We’ve found dozens of adults, but no juveniles.”
It seems that the water in these lakes is too alkaline and/or too salty for the fresh-water snakeheads to breed successfully.
“Hopefully we can control them by removal and without resorting to poison that would kill everything,” Gilmore said.
Both the DEC and the Department of Parks & Recreation want the public to know that fishing is banned within Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in order to prevent anyone from releasing a snakehead into other lakes. They are also worried about the practice of releasing a snakehead into a lake to carry a prayer for good fortune.
“If you have to do that, at least use a native fish - like the official state freshwater fish, the brook trout,” Gilmore says.
The DEC is not going to fine Girardeau for fishing without a license or fishing in the park, “because he did the right thing and called us,” according to Gilmore.
Girardeau, who will not be fishing in Willow Lake anymore, hopes to volunteer with the snakehead removal. “That would be just perfect,” he said.