WMEAC is having a “if you can’t beat 'em, eat 'em” event next month. Any recipes and tips?
Are you talking about Asian carp or commons? Not too many Asian carp (if by this you mean bighead and silver carp) in Western Michigan. Where are you going to get the fish from? There are some in the Missouri River a bit SW of you, and a few in the James in South Dakota.
Water has been very high for a long time, and fish, especially the bigheads, have been losing weight bad, in many areas. Some areas don’t seem to have that problem, but lots of bigheads losing weight pretty bad across the basin, partly because of too many silver carp, and partly because of the high and muddy water, which costs them energetically and inhibits their feeding at the same time, means real skinny fish. Those skinny fish are not worth eating. Yuck. Meat like jello, what there is of it. You can get good fish from the IL River, and I think ones from pretty far up the Missouri are still probably pretty good. Lots of good Asian carp recipes on the web. I like ceviche for grass carp. Blackened is good for silvers. Use Paul Prudhomme’s blackened redfish magic. Try as I might, I can’t make my own that good. I also like curried Asian carp, using an Indian style curry with a tomato sauce base. Great on the grill.
I’ll answer the OP’s question. Yes. I’m positive that with a concerted effort we could eliminate all life on earth, and as a result, there would be no more Asian Carp in the United States.
A lot of folks are nervous about the bighead and silver and grass getting into the Great Lakes basin, and this is event is to raise awareness. I guess they had to locate a farm in LA to get some commercially available fish.
Thanks!
As soon as I read ‘native species’ I thought of native North Americans…and Europeans mozying on over from the other side of the Atlantic…
I’m so deep 
You thought that was good? Just wait til Polycarp chimes in.
Really? Down to the last microbe? I have my doubts about that.
We could certainly take ourselves out, and many (if not most) of the higher species. But I don’t think we’re that powerful (yet).
I’m with the Mercotan on that one. I don’t think we could eliminate all life on earth. We’d even have a tough time killing all the fish in the invaded range of Asian carp (South Dakota to Minnesota to Louisiana, plus a very few fish that might die out on their own in the Great Lakes, if they don’t pull off some spawns. That just might be theoretically possible, but it would be extremely difficult, even if we didn’t care about any other life in the region or on earth, including humans.
By the way, there is an alternative, sometimes known as the daughterless carp method, whereby in theory Asian carps could be eliminated. Asian carps’ phenotypic sex is normally determined by the X/y chromosome method (unlike many fish species). There is a gene on the y chromosome, that when expressed, causes the fish to be phenotypically male. You can, in theory, take that gene, and insert several copies of the gene in many places in the genome of the fish, and hope that some of the extra ones are expressed. You don’t get a supermale if more than one is expressed - you still only get a regular male, phenotypically. But if your female fish is genetically a female, it will express phenotypically as a male, and produce viable milt, and can breed with normal female carp, but all offspring will be phenotypically male (although genotypically, they could be male or female). If there are enough copies of the gene in the fish, and they are being expressed, then theoretically it would take many generations to end up with any offspring of a “daughterless carp” that are female.
Models say that it would take decades to make this work to eliminate common carp from the Murray Darling river in Australia, using reasonable stocking rates of daughterless carp. but they may try it. It could be attempted here with Asian carps, if we could get the background population down to something reasonable first.
There is a chef from the Lockwood restaurant in Chicago that was featured on NBC’s Today show over the holiday weekend that was promoting Asian Carp dishes that they serve in the restaurant. The hosts thought it was very tasty:
I ate a broiled bighead carp on fennel dish there that was very good.
Pessimist.