Yet another is the grotesque mug of an Asian carp, a monster-sized carp imported to the United States in the 1960s and used in government experiments to gobble up excrement in Arkansas sewage lagoons. The fish, which can grow to 70 pounds and eat up to 20 percent of their weight in plankton per day, escaped into the Mississippi River basin decades ago and have been migrating north ever since. They are now mustering at the Great Lakes’ “back door”—the Chicago canal system that created a manmade connection between the previously isolated Great Lakes and the Mississippi basin, which covers about
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