Starting this July, anglers in Arkansas can get paid for the black carp they catch and report to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. The new bounty program will pay fishermen $100 for every black carp they catch, with a maximum of 10 payments or $1,000 per month for each individual angler, according to AGFC’s announcement Wednesday.
The program in Arkansas supports a wider effort by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to map the spread of black carp in the Mississippi River Basin. It’s open to both hook-and-line anglers and bowfishermen, as well as commercial fishermen.
“But they’ll need to follow the correct procedure to ensure they receive payment for their catch,” says AGFC invasive carp biologist Rachael Irby. As part of this process, anglers must:
- Identify the fish species correctly, then humanely dispatch and ice down any black carp before moving them
- Make note of the location (preferably GPS coordinates), the gear used, and current conditions
- Take pictures of the fish’s head and mouth, and measure its total length
- Submit an entry for payment by emailing Irby the above materials and information so that AGFC can arrange to pick up and analyze the harvested carp
“Although the reward is only for the black carp, we still would like to know details about any other invasive carp caught in the state,” Irby says.
To Irby’s point, black carp are just one of four invasive carp species native to Asia that can now be found in Arkansas. The other three are bighead carp, silver carp, and grass carp. Fisheries managers across the larger Mississippi River Basin have been working to reduce these fish for more than 20 years now due to the negative impacts they’re having on native fish species, and officials have grown increasingly concerned as invasive carp have slowly worked their way up the Big Muddy toward the Great Lakes.
Read Next: Biologists Have Discovered a New Way to Control Invasive Carp
A big part of this control effort is understanding how and where the carp are spreading, and that’s where Arkansas’ bounty program comes in. It’s not the only incentive program of its kind, either.
Tennessee, for example, implemented its own Carp Harvest Incentive Program beginning in 2018. Limited to commercial fishermen, the half-a-million dollar program has focused specifically on a few reservoirs along the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers where silver carp (aka “flying carp”) have become a major problem. The TCHIP program ran through its funding by January 31 of this year, after around 35.6 million pounds of carp had been removed from the reservoirs.
Bounty programs for other unwanted fish species have found traction in other watersheds as well. Although it’s currently paused, a federal program in Arizona has paid fishermen $50 a head for brown trout harvested from certain stretches of the Colorado River.
Read Next: Pacific Northwest Angler Earned $164K for Catching Pikeminnow, Shattering the Payout Record
One of the most lucrative bounty programs, however, exists in the Pacific Northwest, where anglers can get paid to catch northern pikeminnow in the Columbia and Snake Rivers. The Northern Pikeminnow Sport-Reward Program, which is meant to help struggling salmon runs (since pikeminnow prey on juvenile salmon and steelhead), has been ongoing since 1991. Last year, the top-earning fishermen set a new payout record for the program, earning $164,260 in less than four months.
Read the full article here
