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Carp roundup is a net gain for Minnesota's lakes


The weather helped scientists, out to rid lakes of the damaging fish, round up 90 percent of the carp in Chanhassen's Lake Susan.

By LAURIE BLAKE, Star Tribune

Talk about a great day of ice fishing.

Capitalizing on a quirk of nature -- carp congregate when it's cold -- University of Minnesota biologists pulled more than 3,000 of the unwelcome bottom feeders, some of them as old as 50 years, out of Chanhassen's Lake Susan on Monday.

Working under steadily pelting snowflakes, six commercial fishermen and 10 researchers located the cache of carp under the frozen surface by tracking radio tags placed on some of the fish during the summer.

A 2,000-foot skein net surrounded the fish under the ice as two tractors pulled the catch toward a 15-foot hole where the fish were scooped out onto a conveyer belt to be weighed, measured and counted.

"We probably caught 90 percent of the fish in that lake,'' said biologist Peter Sorensen of the university's Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology. "This is an effort to remove the vast majority of the carp to see if we can improve the water quality of the lake."

And, he added, "A lot of these females being removed are just fat with eggs.''

The netting marked a milestone in an ongoing U study searching for ways to eliminate destructive carp populations, which dirty up the waters where they are found around Minnesota. The study has focused on three west-suburban lakes: Lake Susan in Chanhassen and Lake Riley and Rice Marsh Lake, both of which straddle the Eden Prairie-Chanhassen city line.

"We have been studying the carp in Lake Susan now for about three years,'' Sorensen said. "We know how many there are and have an idea about where they are coming from.''

The striking thing about Monday's catch, said Sorensen, was that "in that net there was almost nothing but carp -- 95 percent of the fish were carp. They were all large fish."

Game fish were thrown back, but the carp will be sold for food or used as compost at the university's Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.

93 acres and 17 feet deep at the most, but the water clarity is a whopping 7.5 feet, which is pretty good for any lake in the greater Minneapolis area.

There is significant submergent vegetation and some gamefish to be found here. The presence of Eurasian Watermilfoil has been confirmed in Lake Susan. The lake gets stocked with walleye fry once a year, but no doubt many of those get eaten by the numerous northern pike that abound in all sizes in the lake. There are also plenty of small sunnies and perch for foraging predator fish. Largemouth bass and black crappie are here in moderate numbers. However, black and yellow bullheads are the predominant species here. Common carp and white sucker have been also reported here.