Here in the mid-Atlantic states, there's been an invasion by a nasty, non-native fish. It's a predator to basically any fish normally found in rivers and lakes in the part of the country. Known as a snakehead -- or Frankenfish and a host of other icky names -- this fish can survive out of the water for extended periods and it can use its fins to "walk" on water. As a result, the snakehead fish is spreading to waters throughout the mid-Atlantic and there's not much that fish and wildlife officials can do about it. Not a pretty picture.
In my position at the newspaper, I'm responsible for a special outdoors section once a month. In that section, I've run a few items about the snakehead's spread to the Potomac River, which is downstream from our location on the Shenandoah River.
A couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to see a news release that said a group was trying to have the snakehead classified as an endangered species. I thought it was odd, but held on to the release, thinking I'd use it later.
The odd situation became even stranger when a few days later I got another release from the same group telling how property values along snakehead "habitats" would decrease, based on other experiences with endangered species habitats. I held on to that release, too.
Finally the time for my outdoors page rolled around, and I was going to put something in about this movement. I thought if nothing else, I'd get people talking. But before I could put the releases in the paper, I needed an electronic version. I didn't want to retype the releases, so I went to the website, ConservationWire, to get the text. I'm glad I did.
When the page came up, the only links available were for those two releases. Nothing about the organization and no other releases. I thought that was also a little fishy. My suspicions aroused, I turned to the only place left to turn to: Google News.
Just a few keystrokes and I had my answers. Hours earlier, stories started running about a group of western officials who are trying to point out how ridiculous endangered species policies are. These westerners have contended with environmentalists who have protected everything they could, creating frustrating situations for lots of people. So to get back at policymakers in the east, the westerners picked the eastern pest -- the snakehead, which has been found in waters right in the Washington, DC area. Kind of funny, actually.
I thought it was interesting that even though I'd been sitting on the news releases for a couple of weeks, news organizations seemed to just be getting on the real story. And I was glad I hadn't just run the news releases as I got them. It wouldn't have been a mortal error, but it would have created a messy situation.
The moral of the story: when something seems out-of-place, check it out.
Posted by JRC at February 23, 2005 09:13 PM | TrackBack