DelRaySteve brought the Return of Snakehead to my attention last night.
The snakehead fish, a voracious Asian invader that’s been known to breathe out of water and scoot short distances over land, has reappeared in Maryland, state authorities announced yesterday.
A 19-inch northern snakehead was caught Monday at a lake in Wheaton Regional Park — the first appearance of the toothy green fish in the area since 2002, when the state of Maryland had to poison a pond in Crofton to prevent snakeheads there from wiggling away.
[read the rest of the article]
So is this technically the Return of Snakehead or is it Snakehead: the sequel? We don’t know the sex of the fish yet so we can’t properly call it Son of Snakehead. Plus the article says this particular snakehead is 4 years old and the last snakehead hooha in Maryland was in 2002, and this is a different body of water, so the odds of it being the spawn on one of the last snakeheads to terrorize us are pretty slim. Really it’s a copycat snakehead or maybe it’s…Maybe I need to stop thinking about this and go back to bed.
I think the final answer is: I need to stop watching B-horror movies for a while.
The Washington Post has some utterly hysterical pictures of the snakehead, and this little featurette in the Style section:
Panic Alert: Snakehead Spotted!
A northern snakehead, the fearsome fish-beast that can breathe air and walk on land, has turned up in Wheaton. It was last seen two years ago in a backwoods pond in Anne Arundel County, and authorities could not say yesterday whether traffic on Route 50 was responsible for the delay in the creature’s reaching its current location. But we’re confident the following will soon occur:
ï Montgomery County schools will close.
ï The start of the intercounty connector will be delayed another two years.
ï Trash cans will be removed from all playgrounds within a five-mile radius to encourage better table manners in the voracious species.
ï County Democrats will blame Gov. Bob Ehrlich for insufficient attention to the environment.
ï Ehrlich will blame the Democrats for not approving slots.
ï Snakeheads will manage to board the Red Line but will be unable to find a seat.
ï Bumper stickers reading “Snakeheads Have Rights Too” will be spotted in Takoma Park.
ï Fifty people — most of them with graduate degrees — will write letters to The Post’s ombudsman denouncing Style for making light of this grave threat to our health and well-being.
— Steve Reiss
That’s really the most astute reporting I’ve seen in the Post in a while, come to think of it.
I copied and pasted the whole thing because it wasn’t very long and the registration requirements on the Post site are pretty annoying. It is worth visiting the site to see all the funny pictures, however, especially the one on the front page.
You notice the snakehead chose to reveal himself at exactly the right moment to deflect our attention from the 9/11 commission and the increasing mess in Iraq. Coincidence? Or is the snakehead playing partisan politics? Maybe this thing is even more dangerous than we thought….