MOUNT VERNON, Virginia (Reuters) — May 30, 2013 — They're freakishly strong, hungry air-breathers that can survive for short periods on land. But northern snakehead fish, once viewed as an unstoppable scourge in U.S. waters, may have gotten a bad rap.
So far, they've surfaced in waters from Massachusetts to California, and from Manhattan's Central Park to a pair of creeks in Arkansas. The biggest cluster is in and around the Chesapeake Bay, and officials in Maryland and Virginia have taken different paths to trying to keep them from interfering with the bay's delicate ecological balance.
The threat of the snakehead, which is believed to spawn repeatedly during the year unlike other species that spawn just once, is that it is such a hardy newcomer that it could squeeze out longer-established and more desired fish.
Native to China's Yangtze River basin, the so-called "frankenfish" made its first big media splash in the United States in 2002, when a thriving population was discovered in a Maryland pond outside Washington.
Known taxonomically as Channa argus or "lightning perch," they were purported to be able to "walk" on land, to wipe out native species and to have no natural predators.
Read the full story from Reuters at Scientific American