We are part of The Trust Project.
WORTHINGTON — After a week of baiting carp in Worthington’s Lake Okabena with shelled corn, a team from Carp Solutions was in town Wednesday to pull up the nets and dispose of the carp that were captured.
By the end of the afternoon, they had tossed 306 fairly hefty carp into a roll-off dumpster delivered by Schaap Sanitation. The carp were euthanized with a mixture containing clove oil before being disposed of.
Carp Solutions had set traps at four different locations in the lake — adjacent to Slater, Vogt and Ehlers parks, as well as near Cherry Point, off of West Lake Avenue. The traps are set in about 4.5 feet of water in areas visible from shore due to the large white poles used to mark the sites.
According to Okabena-Ocheda Watershed District Administrator Dan Livdahl, the Cherry Point location proved the most successful, with 153 carp captured in the net there. The other three locations had a combined netting of 153 carp.
Of those captured, just 12 contained the PIT (Passive Integrated Transponder) tags that researchers with Wenck and Carp Solutions have implanted in carp for the study to determine carp population density in the lake. Livdahl said six of the tags were traced to Wenck’s tagging efforts a year and a half ago, with the other six implanted in carp that were captured by Carp Solutions in late June.
ADVERTISEMENT
Carp Solutions plans one more carp removal event in a couple of weeks, and Livdahl said he and OOWD board manager Casey Ingenthron will begin baiting the traps again on Monday in preparation for trapping.
