Invasive Pike Returning To Kenai Waters?

The Kenai Peninsula appears to have a pike problem again. Here’s the Alaska Beacon with more, which included the idea that pike had been eradicated from the region:

The celebration proved short-lived.

A week later, Fish and Game officials got a report from an angler who was fishing in a remote lake on the northern part of the peninsula. The angler, who went to a site in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge called Vogel Lake, said he had caught a northern pike there. Fish and Game officials, armed with nets, came to Vogel Lake the following spring and confirmed that invasive pike were in the lake.

It was the first documented case in North America of invasive northern pike, considered an exclusively freshwater fish, swimming in an estuary, an area where freshwater and saltwater meet.

“I think everybody’s jaw dropped,” said Matthew Wooller, the University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist who is a lead author of a newly published study describing the discovery.

It’s also a concern that these northern pike appear to be heading into the Kenai’s river systems via saltwater in Cook Inlet. From the Beacon:

Wooller, a professor at UAF’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences and director of the university’s stable isotope laboratory, used chemical analysis to show that the pike that colonized Vogel Lake got there after swimming in the marine saltwater of Cook Inlet.

“They’re actually a freshwater fish, so to show evidence that they spent some time in an estuarine environment is very surprising. It’s not something they should want to be spending time doing.” Wooller said.

It is also worrying, he said.

“If they can kind of dip into the marine environment, go up another river, dip into marine environment, go up another river, that’s an additional way of invading,” he said.