“Under mostly sunny skies and temperatures hovering near 30 degrees, a three-man crew from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the DNR motored across the bay in a flat-bottomed boat looking for promising sites to sample.

A scientist at the University of Notre Dame pioneered the technique of using DNA to search for populations of Asian carp. But the first step is far from rocket science:

One member of the crew stretched in a nearly prone position over the side of the boat and dipped a 2-liter plastic bottle into the 40-degree water. The driver read out GPS coordinates, the water temperature and the depth. The third man from the crew scribbled down the information.

The samples are processed in Green Bay and then packed with dry ice and sent to a Fish and Wildlife Service laboratory in La Crosse, where the DNA sequencing is done and water is matched with known DNA specimens of the two carp species. The samples will be queued up with hundreds of other potential carp samples from Illinois and elsewhere.”