For the first time, the northern snakehead — an air-breathing predator that can wriggle short distances across wet ground — has turned up on Long Island, and New York wildlife managers are scrambling to keep it from spreading.
The fish surfaced in Lily Pond, a small water body beside Lake Ronkonkoma in Suffolk County. Angler Vinny Conwell caught the first publicly recorded specimen on May 21, and state crews have since located at least three of them, prompting the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to launch electro-fishing sweeps of the surrounding swamp.
To the DEC, the discovery is a problem to be stamped out fast. "It doesn't have a predator; it's kept unbalanced. It will eat the native fish and really it'll upset the balance," said Heidi O'Riordan, the DEC's Region 1 fisheries manager. She did not play down the species' unusual mobility: "Certainly, these fish can walk on land, they can cross the road."
O'Riordan said New York has no intention of learning to live with the fish the way some southern states have. "Other states deal with it in different ways, but in New York, we put a lot of effort into preserving our water, so this is not something we want here," she told ABC7. Her chief worry is Lake Ronkonkoma itself: "We really want to be on top of it and get rid of them quickly because we have Lake Ronkonkoma['s] bass wildlife, so having the snakehead move in there would not be a good situation," she told CBS News New York.
Anglers do not all share the alarm. Conwell, who shipped his catch to Florida to be mounted, is an unabashed fan. "These fish are some of the hardest fighting species you can catch," he told Wired2Fish, adding that they "have been here for many years. It was only a matter of time before someone made it public that they caught one." He bristles at the creature's billing as an ecological menace. "It's a shame that they've gotten the reputation they have," he said. "These fish are not going to cause any kind of problems to the general public."
That split — thrilling sportfish to some, "Frankenfish" to others — has played out across Long Island as footage of the catches circulated online. Outdoor outlet The Cool Down captured the divide, quoting one local fisher who gushed, "These fish are so awesome. The fight. Everything about them is great," against residents anxious about a lake that is slowly recovering. "I don't want this thing affecting Lake Ronkonkoma. It's getting a little cleaner, so we don't need invasive species," one told the site.
New York's rules leave no room for the catch-and-release instinct. "When an angler catches a snakehead in New York, you CANNOT RELEASE IT," O'Riordan said. The DEC asks anglers to kill the fish, photograph it, note the location and report it to the regional fisheries unit, freezing the specimen so biologists can sample it. Officials believe the population most likely arrived through aquarium dumping or a live-market release.
The Long Island sightings are one front in a wider spread. The New York Times reported in May that snakeheads are proliferating in waterways from New York to Florida, with wildlife officials around the Chesapeake Bay now urging bowfishers to thin them out with high-powered compound bows. For now, New York's weapon of choice is the electro-fishing boat — and the hope, as DEC biologist Kevin Jennings put it, that "hopefully we can get it before they move to any other locations."
