Produced by June A. Bowery, Jasmine Saroa, Victoria Bouffard

What happens when a fish becomes a symbol? In this episode, we follow invasive carp through the Illinois River, tracing a story that starts with federal fish commissions in the 1800s and leads to the Brandon Road Interbasin Project, a billion-dollar barrier system designed to keep carp out of the Great Lakes. The United States imported these fish on purpose. They spread through waterways humans engineered. And somewhere along the way, they acquired a name that carried far more weight than biology. Drawing from scientific studies, government reports, media coverage, and community perspectives, we examine how invasive carp became one of the most recognizable environmental controversies in the United States. We explore how the label "Asian carp" flattened ecological complexity into a single threatening category, how viral images of jumping silver carp transformed an environmental issue into a public spectacle, and how invasion rhetoric began intersecting with larger conversations about borders, belonging, and national identity. Perspectives from scientists, anglers, and Indigenous scholars complicate familiar narratives about invasive species and environmental management while revealing competing visions of how rivers, species, and movement should be understood. This is a story about fish, but it was never only about fish. It is also a story about language, power, and the ways societies decide what does and does not belong.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Huber, P. (1995). A Short History of Redneck: The Fashioning of a Southern White Masculine Identity. Southern Cultures, 1(2), 145–166. https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.1995.0074

Rasmussen, B. (2024). Angling in the Anthropocene: Carp and the Making of Race on the Los Angeles River. Rewilding the Urban Frontier: River Conservation in the Anthropocene, 287–315.

U.S. Geological Survey. (2018). “Asian carp” is societally and scientifically problematic. Let’s replace it.

Wehi, P. M., Kamelamela, K. L., Whyte, K., Watene, K., & Reo, N. (2023). Contribution of Indigenous Peoples' understandings and relational frameworks to invasive alien species management. People and Nature, 5, 1403–1414. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10508

Pests and Prejudice is a podcast series created by UCLA undergraduates in the spring of 2026. Each episode is a story of a messy relationship, one in which people seduced pests, and then decided to break up with them... and it usually goes about as well as you would expect...