Word on the street is that the Snakehead, an ugly and intrusive species, is basically hell for everyone and everything related to the waters they infest.
Ok, that sucks for us and the other little fishies.
BUT
Supposing Obama appoints you as Fish Czar, what could you do to extirpate them? Some kind of poison that is attached to the Snakehead DNA? Pay fishers $10 a head for them?
Or is it hopeless?
Hopeless, unless you’re willing to kill entire bodies of water and restock them manually.
I’d call in Bruce Boxleitner.
Not even that will work. They are established in the watershed system in South Florida. That means they have literally hundreds of thousands of miles of rivers, canals, and estuaries to use. Realistically there is nothing to be done about them. Their impact is not yet fully understood, but so far I don’t think that there has been a noticeable effect. The good news is that they are a rather tasty fish. They are heavily predated on by all the usual suspects as fry and juveniles, and by all the fish eating species as adults. Providing we keep the larger giant species out we ought to be okay. Our waters have adapted to a broad range of foreign species without any real impact. You still catch loads of bass, bream, sunfish, and native catfish and gar along with the oscars, acara, peacock bass, plecos and snakeheads.
But isn’t it possible to do that genetic engineering stuff, where say they modify the Snakehead DNA to make it susceptible to some otherwise harmless algae or something, and then drop these modified snakeheads with their bad genes in to ruin their genepool?
or somehow develop a disease, biological warfare, that only harms the DNA of snakefish?
Cane Toads, Pythons, and Asian Carp could easily displace them.
Which suggests that you might invent a better name than “snakehead”, and try to get the thing to be seen as a trendy entree at restaurants. Much like “Chilean sea bass” sounds so much better than “Patagonian toothfish”. People will harvest them for profit, and for a while it might even take a bit of pressure off the overfishing of other species.
As Fish Czar, you should spend your effort on other invasive species IMO. Snakeheads don’t seem that bad.
Because evolution. 
Siamese Fighting Flounder 
That should read, “no, because evolution”.
No flies on Acid Lamp, who has done his homework. It is unclear whether snakeheads will actually create much of a problem or not. They are very similar in habits to the bowfin, a native fish, and I find it hard to see how they will do more damage than the bowfin, which is an undesired fish that is very common and native. But the snakehead has a certain cachet because of the name and the hype, and is attracting fishermen. In fact, I’m worried that the growing popularity of the snakehead as a sportfish will cause them to be quickly widely spread, before we really find out what the longterm negative (and maybe positive) effects are.
I’ve eaten snakehead several times, and frankly I don’t like it much, but it is better eating than bowfin, which can be eaten if you get them from cold water and get them on ice right away, but otherwise are inedible - and they are always soft-meated.
Anyway, snakehead will take a lure, which is better than Asian carp, and I think we are going to have them around for a long time, and not only in Florida. There are snakeheads in Arkansas, that I suspect will eventually spread throughout the Mississippi River basin. A massive attempt to eradicate snakeheads in Arkansas was apparently unsuccessful.
Sassyfrass - It might be possible to eradicate snakeheads through genetic modification, but it would require continued stocking of many fish, over many generations of fish, and would be quite expensive and result in a temporary increase in the number of undesired fish out there. One GM method that has been proposed is the supermale or daughterless male method, whereby one stocks males that produce offspring that are all phenotypically male (whether genetically male or female) and nearly all offspring of those progeny are also phenotypically male. The population would eventually die out from lack of females after many generations. Models indicate this would take decades of stocking large numbers of fish to eradicate common carp from Australian rivers, and that if the stocking was discontinued prematurely, the populations would recover.
There would be no danger of this gene jumping into other species, because you are not really creating some gene that is not already out there, or moving something from a plant. The technology requires only that you take the gene that makes a fish phenotypically male and transplant it into the fish in many places, so that there are always some copies of the gene active, at least through several generations. But there is no new gene from another species involved.
Also, regarding the “fish czar” Obama did in fact appoint an Asian carp czar (John Goss) this week (before someone goes of on him for this, he did it at the request of mostly republican state governors).
Are they the ones who send the fan mail?
Correct - and to expand on this - the question amounts to: If we created, then introduced a weak, less-competitive strain, would it overwhelm and outcompete the stronger, more competitive existing one?
Baconfish has a tasty ring to it.
Maybe we should use GM not to eliminate the snakehead but to make it more tasty.
Say what? I thought they were tropical and it gets darn cold here.
Channa argus, the northern snakehead, is a temperate zone species:
Can’t we start a rumor that snakeheads improve the virility of elderly Chinese men? That seems to push everything else to the brink of extinction in nothing flat.
Exactly why (in theory) it takes so dang long for such techniques to work, and why they are so expensive. You have to overcome the natural tendency of the lower fitness individuals to fail to compete by continued artificial reproduction and release of the less-fit version. It has never been done, as of yet. But in theory, it could work, it just takes time and money.
Another thing to remember, on the reverse end: the potential for continued escape of GM modified salmon, for example, could be a drag on the gene pool, if those fish are less fit than the native ones. (the fish are not less fit from the viewpoint of the fish farmer, of course, because they grow faster - but the traits that make them grow faster in aquaculture, and other traits that are not necessarily bad in cage aquaculture might make a fish much less fit in the wild.) If they stop escaping (read, are no longer used - because if they are used they WILL escape), and the genes are less fit in the wild, one surmises the genes would breed out over time, if the species survives the damage to the gene pool in the meantime.