Trying to net an Asian carp that was soaring through the air a few feet away, Mike Pernet didn't see another 10-pound fish flying at his head until it hit him square in the mouth.  "It hurt," Pernet said, blood running from his mouth and down his chin as he sat in a johnboat on the Illinois River.

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"It loosened some of my teeth."Pernet was among 300 people who took part in last weekend's Redneck Carp Tournament on the Illinois River, where participants could use only hand nets or clubs to capture the Asian carp as they erupted from the water and flew through the air like batteries of submarine missiles.

A bar owner in Bath -- population 350 -- staged the second annual carp tournament on Aug. 26 for laughs and slimy fun, yes, but also to draw attention to the invasive fish that many experts fear could threaten -- or even decimate -- sport and commercial fisheries on the Great Lakes.  A faltering, temporary electric barrier outside Chicago, in theory, keeps the Asian carp from entering Lake Michigan. A more powerful barrier, with two rows of electrodes crossing a canal, should have been in place last October, but Congress has yet to approve $16 million in funding.  In the meantime, Asian carp have closed within 50 miles of Lake Michigan and turned large sections of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers into carp havens where little else can survive.

"We want the state and federal government to do something," said Betty DeFord, owner of the Boat Tavern in Bath, about 180 miles southwest of Chicago. "I don't even take my grandchildren out on the water any more. If a 20-pound carp came into a boat and landed on a 2- or 3-year-old child, it could kill them."
Getting airborne is an escape mechanism for carp when spooked by a predator or a boat engine. Pernet, from Athens, Ill., was luckier than Charlie Meyer of Springfield, Ill., who had to go to a hospital for a broken nose after he was decked by a flying fish in the Bath Chute. That's why, for protection, some fishermen wore helmets, masks or hard hats.

Asian carp have become so thick in the Illinois River that the 78 boats in the Redneck tournament caught 1,840 in three hours by netting them out of the air like behemoth butterflies. The winning boat, with six fishermen, caught 126 carp, an average of one fish every 85 seconds.  Two species of Asian carp -- silver carp that leap like kangaroos, and bigheads, which don't jump -- have been spotted in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal below Lake Michigan. In their native Southeast Asia, the bigheads

To stop the carp's advance, fishing interests want Congress to quickly fund the permanent barrier in the canal near Chicago and renovate the temporary barrier as a backup.
The House and Senate have passed separate bills to fund the barriers but must reach a compromise in a conference committee. Even then, some people fear that the carp already have reached the Great Lakes and that the barriers will prove ineffective because fish can be shoved across by the wakes of barges.

Michigan's senior senator, Carl Levin, and other members of the Michigan congressional delegation have pushed for the funding, and Levin said Friday that they'll continue that fight.  "There are very serious concerns that these exotic species would devastate native fisheries in the Lakes and undo years of restoration efforts," Levin, a Democrat, said in a statement.  "I have worked with my colleagues for several years to ensure funding for the temporary electric dispersal barrier, and I will continue working to authorize funding in the Water Resources Development Act for the construction of a permanent barrier and the operation of both barriers by the Army Corps of Engineers."If the carp do reach the Great Lakes, most experts warn that the lakes will become giant carp ponds where other species, such as salmon, lake trout and walleyes, are starved out of existence. After colonizing the lakes, experts say, the carp would assault rivers and their tributaries. Sport and commercial fisheries are a $5-billion-a-year business on the Great Lakes.

"These things are so scary because of the way they can take over the habitat and become dominant so quickly," said Gary Towns, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources fisheries resources manager in Southfield.  In 1990, for instance, biologists netted no Asian carp when they sampled the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. Ten years later, Asian carp made up 97% of a massive fish kill in a Mississippi slough south of St. Louis. Asian carp were first seen in the Bath area about five years ago, but now represent 90% of the fish."These are species that could be as destructive, or even more so, than sea lampreys and zebra mussels," said Marc Gaden, spokesman for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, the Canadian-American body that manages the Great Lakes. "We know that they can handle the climate and they do well in bays, estuaries and backwaters. They tend to become 90-95% of the fish" population in a body of water.

Asian carp were imported in the 1970s to control algae in commercial fish farm ponds in the South, but they escaped into the Mississippi River about 30 years ago and have been spreading ever since.  Unlike common carp, which have been in North America about 130 years and feed mostly on insects and crustaceans, the Asian carp suck algae and zooplankton out of the water like submarine vacuum cleaners, competing with creatures at the bottom of the food chain.They will not bite a lure or a baited hook. By the time they reach adult size, they have no predators. They thrive under ice.

"The bighead carp can filter things out of the water down to (microscopic) sizes," Towns said. "To a biologist, that's incredible. They are absolutely unique in that ability. We have to find a way to stop them, because ignoring them is like playing Russian roulette."

On the Illinois River, 700 of 800 commercial fishermen, by state estimates, quit the business after the carp took over and eliminated most of the buffalo fish and catfish that were their livelihood.
Then about three years ago, a few began netting carp for sale to markets in Asian communities in North America.
Biologists said that was a bad idea, because it gave commercial value to species they wanted to eradicate. But now the State of Illinois is funding studies to learn if commercial fishing on a much larger scale might control or even reduce carp numbers.

Steve McNitt, sales manager for Schafer Fisheries in Thomson, Ill., sold more than 2 million pounds of Asian carp last year and hopes that will increase tenfold. Most went to fish stores in Asian communities in North America, and a small amount went for the gefilte fish market in cities with Jewish populations."We're in the fresh fish market now," McNitt said. "Asian people only want bigheads, not the silvers. They eat the fillets and use the heads for soup. We ship some to New York, Chicago and Canada, but our big markets are San Francisco and Los Angeles."Reviews of how Asian carp taste vary. Some consider it mild, bordering on bland, and filled with annoying small bones. But carp supporters point out a University of Arkansas study in which six of 10 people preferred canned carp to canned tuna.

McNitt hopes Illinois will subsidize the construction of processing plants that would grind tens of millions of pounds of carp into frozen patties that could be shipped worldwide."I think that if we ever get a program going where we can mince and bread the fish and produce a new product, we could really increase demand," he said. "And because we'd be mincing the fish, we could mix silver carp with the bigheads."

The Asian carp have been good for Orion Briney of Browning, Ill., one of the few commercial fishermen who successfully made the switch from native species. He has harvested about 4 million pounds of bigheads in the last three years. "I sell about 20,000 pounds ... a week," he said. "I run one boat now, but I have three, and if they get a processing plant going, I'd run all of them."Briney, who said carp had doubled his income to nearly $200,000 last year, thinks that the commercial fishery already has decreased the size and numbers of bighead carp. "When we started," he said, "there were a lot that went 40 to 60 pounds. Now they run 15 to 30."

From a boat on the Illinois River, the flying carp look like something out of an animated cartoon, their gleaming forms soaring 10 feet high and 30 feet across the surface as they erupt from the water in singles and triples and dozens. People in several states, mostly boaters and jet skiers, have suffered injuries from flying carp. Troy Talkington, who owns Talk's Bait Shop in Browning, Ill., a few miles down the river, said many boats sport dents from carp collisions."Earlier this summer," he said, "we were going camping on the river and were trying to get to the campground as it got dark. A friend was sitting on the bow with a spotlight, trying to show the way, and he kept getting smacked in the face and chest by silver carp. One hit him so hard it knocked the wind out of him."

Tom Matych of Twin Lake, near Muskegon, entered the Redneck tournament and said Michiganders must realize the dangers of the Asian carp and demand that the federal government take action.  "Being hit by a flying carp is like being hit by a bowling ball," Matych said as he stood in the prow of a boat, armed with a steel pipe and swinging like a baseball player at silver carp blasting up from under the bows. "In a way, the silver carp are a blessing as well as a curse. Because they jump, they draw attention to the problem."

And then Matych described a nightmarish scenario.  "The bridges over the Illinois are all pretty high because of barge traffic," he said, "but a lot of bridges in Michigan are just a few feet above the water. Can you imagine what would happen if a big truck went over a bridge on the Manistee or Muskegon and spooked a school of these things? How would you like a 20-pound carp to hit your windshield at 60 miles an hour?"