Maryland's DNR has announced that they are renewing their past partnership with Bass Pro Shops to offer a sort of bounty for dead snakehead fish. Anglers who provide a photo of themselves with a dead snakehead will be rewarded with a $200 gift card from Bass Pro Shops.On one hand, I want to applaud this. I like seeing real action to remove harmful invasive species. However, I think that this will fall short of what could be accomplished with a more conventional bounty program.
Historically, there have been some very effective bounty programs for getting rid of wildlife in the US. Grey wolves were extirpated from most of their range in North America due to a bounty placed on their hides. Over 128,000 bald eagles were killed for a bounty program in Alaska during the early twentieth century. Grey wolves weren't wiped out of the lower 48 by weekend warriors while they were out hunting deer and happened to bump into a wolf. They were mostly killed by seasoned year-round trappers and hunters using the bounty system to patch together a living that didn't include punching a clock (as well as by ranchers protecting their livestock). The effect of these programs was ecologically horrible in the long run, but my point is that we can use these as a template for action against invasive species.
The key to making a bounty system work is ensuring that there is a dollar value attached to the animal that allows a skilled outdoorsman to make a living at it.
Gift certificates are not going to work. A $200 gift card probably provides an incentive for an occasional fisherman to get out on the water for an extra Saturday every month. It creates a strong incentive for people who are already catching snakeheads now and then to start reporting them. But it is not the basis of a career.
My personal experience in the field suggests that a majority of snakeheads caught on the Potomac river are not reported as legally required. I made many trips to the Virginia portion of the Potomac while working on the snakehead chapter of my forthcoming book, 'Eating Aliens' (launching in August with Storey Publishing). I chatted with fishermen at boat landings and interviewed park rangers and naturalists. The fishermen tended to say, off the record, that they'd caught snakeheads from time to time but they never reported them. In fact, out of all of the people I met who had ever caught snakeheads, the only one who had ever reported a catch was a state park employee.
Very few of these fishermen whom I met were ever deliberately targeting snakeheads. They were out fishing for bass and sometimes they would accidentally hook a snakehead. The exceptions I encountered (or more often heard about second hand) are a few Chinese immigrants who are specifically hunting snakeheads -- and they are very good at it. I strongly suspect that they are selling the fish to other individuals or markets for use in traditional Chinese medicine. That is fine with me, by the way. So long as the fish is killed, everybody wins.
Getting recreational fishermen out on the water a little bit more often is not going to make much of a dent in the snakehead population. Those people are never going to develop a lot of expertise at hunting snakeheads. Its like the difference between picking up a guitar twice a month versus practicing for 3 hours a day, every day. What we need is a bunch more people like those Chinese fishermen.
Offer a bounty of, say, $30 cash per fish and see what happens. Use the existing system of game check systems and perhaps a select number of fishing license retailers. The fisherman brings in his snakeheads, an employee chops off either the tail or a particular fin and then gives the fisherman either cash (reimbursed by the state) or a code that the fisherman can use online to facilitate a money transfer from the state.
There are plenty of talented fishermen out there who really hate their day jobs and just need to be outdoors. If they know that they can make $180 a day by catching half a dozen snakeheads -- plus whatever they can get paid for the actual fish from an Asian market -- then this starts to look like something worth doing. You've got to pay them enough of a bounty to cover the cost of gas and maintenance for their boat as well as a living for themselves. Some of them will get good enough to supplement their income by working on the weekends as fishing guides. Letting them use baited traps would be a good idea, too.
Bounty programs can really work. This effort in Maryland is a good start, but I think that what I have described would work better than gift cards.
[Photo copyright 2012 by Jackson Landers.]
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