Snakehead: A fish out of water by Eric Jay Dolin, Smithsonian Institution Press, 拢18.95/$24.95, ISBN 1588341542 Reviewed by Adrian Barnett
鈥淚N A pond where it didn鈥檛 belong/ Lived a snakehead as big as King Kong./ It ate all the fishes and said 鈥楬ow delicious鈥�/ But now I鈥檒l be moseyin鈥� along.鈥�
Accompanied by pictures of a huge fish terrorising a fisherman and then being attacked by jet planes, this limerick appeared in The Washington Post on 7 July 2002. Also the subject of cartoons and song, the snakehead, a voracious south-east Asian fish, is the eponymous anti-hero of Eric Jay Dolin鈥檚 book Snakehead: A fish out of water.
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Dolin tells the story of an alien invasion that terrified parts of the north-eastern US through the summer of 2002. Ugly, toothy and unfriendly, the northern snakehead鈥檚 appearance in genteel Maryland had all the elements of a B-movie creature feature. Editors and cartoonists had a silly-season field day.
But the Maryland Department of Natural Resources was doing anything but laughing. Not only could adult snakeheads wreck game fisheries and decimate duck populations, younger ones could gulp their way though populations of smaller fish, endangering freshwater fishers such as herons and kingfishers. And, when the pond where the snakeheads had originally been dumped was poisoned with herbicide, it became clear that this hooligan relative of the gentle gourami was as good at breeding as it was at eating. More than a hundred young snakeheads were found. The subtitle puns with the fact that the fish was both alien and able to move long distances over land to reach new ponds.
With a fine combination of wildlife biology, interviews and news material, Dolin documents a plague that would never have started had not someone released two 30-centimetre fishy Molochs into a Maryland pond at Crofton. He charts the fish鈥檚 discovery and the attempts at elimination, and takes in social views and reactions at the time. Leavened by cartoons and clippings, it is a wonderful, intriguing and fascinatingly complete documentation of a social and ecological phenomenon. In a world of global commerce, easy transport and global warming, it is also a warning that B-movie scenarios of ecological havoc may be not so fantastic after all.