January-February 2021 • Nebraskaland 45
homeowners association. "People are
scared to go tubing and skiing and
stuff because they might jump up and
hit somebody and hurt them real bad."
Several people have been hit by "fl ying
fi sh," but none seriously injured.
With the possible liability involved,
the association hired Jeff Reidemann,
a commercial fi sherman from
Minnesota, to seine the lake in 2018.
While that operation did remove about
8,000 pounds of Asian carp, estimated
to be 20 percent of the total present,
obstructions on the lake bottom,
including an old truck, snagged the
nets and limited the success.
The bright side to these invasions is
that unlike common carp, Asian carp
do not, except in rare circumstances,
reproduce in still water. Their eggs and
larvae must drift for some time to be
viable. When Blaser aged the fi sh that
were harvested, he found year classes
that didn't match fl ooding events.
Blaser suggested they check any inlet
and outlet structures. When they did,
they found an outlet used to control
lake levels dumped into a ditch that
led straight to the Platte River and was
not fi tted with screens to keep fi sh out.
When water levels were high, "Those
older fi sh and the young of the year
fi sh were fi nding that and following it
up into the sandpit," Blaser said.
The outlet has since been modifi ed
with a pump station and backfl ow
preventer to keep fi sh out.
In 2019, the association brought
the seining company back, along with
Tony Havranek of WSB Engineering,
a Minnesota company. Havranek
brought with him a plan adopted from
similar work being conducted to drive
and round up Asian Carp in the United
States.
DUANE CHAPMAN of the
U.S. Geological Survey in Columbia,
Missouri, has been working on the
biology and control of Asian carp
since 2002. Through that work, he has
developed relationships with fi sheries
biologists in China, where these carp
species are raised commercially.
While working on a book with one
of those biologists, one of harvest
techniques used by the Chinese, the
A commercial fi shing crew from Minnesota pulls in a seine containing 25,000 pounds of fi sh, mostly silver carp, from
Hanson Lake No. 3 following two days of work in December 2019 that used sound and electricity to drive the fi sh into a bay.
