EDWARDSBURG — The U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to get involved in a dispute over how to prevent Asian carp from getting into the Great Lakes.

The justices on Monday turned down a new request from Michigan to consider ordering permanent closure of the Chicago-area shipping locks to prevent the invasive species from threatening Lake Michigan.

At Lunker’s in Edwardsburg, the news from the nation’s high court was a disappointment.

“We don’t need the foreign fish or whatever you want to call them over here if it would do damage to the Great Lakes,” said Greg Clark as he looked for new accessories for his boat.

“Fishing is a huge part of our business,” said Kevin Claire, the general manager at Lunker’s. “So anything that could be an imminent danger to that threatens what we’ve got and threatens most of our customers as to what could potentially happen.”

The court had previously declined to order the locks closed on an emergency basis while it considered whether to hear the case. Michigan has led the legal fight to close the locks, arguing that the ravenous carp — weighing up to 100 pounds — could decimate the Great Lakes’ $7 billion fishing industry by starving out competing species of fish.

Mike Cox, Michigan attorney general, reacted to the Supreme Court decision by saying that thousands of Michigan jobs now depend on the willingness of President Obama and Congress to protect the Great Lakes over “the narrow interests of the president’s home state of Illinois.”

Cox has started an online petition drive at www.StopAsianCarp.com. He has also established a Facebook page to deal with the issue. Cox is also a candidate for governor in Michigan.

Ecologist, Lindsay Chadderton, who works with a team of research biologists at Notre Dame, has been teaming up with the Illinois DNR and the Army Corps of Engineers to monitor DNA evidence left behind by the Asian carp in Lake Michigan and in the Chicago shipping locks.

“Closing the locks, in theory at least, would slow down the movement of those fish through the system,” Chadderton said Monday upon learning of the Supreme Court’s decision.

Back in February, Chadderton told a packed house at a public meeting on the Asian carp in St. Joseph that he believes the Asian carp have likely already gotten into Lake Michigan. He says ongoing recent sampling that his team has done has only re-confirmed those suspicions.

“The clock is ticking. While we talk, the fish continue to swim. As water temperatures increase and if we get any flooding events, there’s a reasonable expectation we’ll see the fish moving into rivers like the St. Joe River in South Bend,” says Chadderton.

“Of course, if it gets into Lake Michigan, who knows where it goes from there as far as the river system goes. So then your inland species are threatened,” worries Claire.

“I fish the St. Joe River a lot,” Clark said. “That would hurt the St. Joe River also. They’re jumping, they’re hitting people in the boats. They’re not an edible fish. We need to get rid of it.”

“We need to move toward ecological separation, restoring the natural balance which is the separation of the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River system,” Chadderton emphasized. “We need to move more rapidly to come up with a long-term solution,”

Chadderton says altering the cargo transit facilities in the old outdated Chicago shipping locks could help. He says boat lifts might be one solution. He says boat lifts in the canal systems in Canada move boats up and out of the water and across a physical barrier into a lock.

“So the canal could still function, but it would prevent passage of the invasive species,” Chadderton explained.

Chadderton says he thinks the last, best hope for dealing with the problem now doesn’t hinge on the courts, but rather on inter-agency cooperation. He says the Illinois DNR, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the EPA all need to work together with urgency to solve the problem.

One interim measure that the Army Corps of Engineers is taking is to build a 13-mile-long barricade along the Des Plaines River and I&M Canal to prevent Asian carp from moving from those areas into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, especially during heavy flooding.

However, Michigan attorney general spokeswoman Joy Yearout says the Corps had plans for this long before the carp were even found in the Canal. She says much more than this is needed to address the issue of keeping the carp out of the Great Lakes.

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