The snakehead fish found in BC Central Park lake

This strange  fish was captured June 8, after alert  Burnaby residents spotted it and the pictures and videos of the snakehead were  posted  online  that started an intensive search for this alien in Canadian waters.


....On Thursday, he put aside his scalpel  in the middle of slicing open the specimen in an SFU lab to talk about the finned fiend that's caused near hysteria recently.
"It looks like a very predatory fish. As an animal goes, it's an impressive beast," Beakes said while carving the fish with fellow biology grad student Corey Phillis.




The highly invasive northern snakehead, native to China and Russia, is feared for its ability to decimate ecosystems by wiping out fish populations. It can breed rapidly, laying up to 50,000 eggs at a time. It can eat its way through a pond full of fish - even small animals like turtles and ducks - then "walk" on its fins toward the next lake, and can survive more than three days out of water and withstand icy temperatures in low-oxygen water or burrow in the mud. It has no known predators. Think of it as a freshwater Jaws.

...Ultimately, scientists want to figure out where the fish - the first believed to be caught in Canada, though it has been found in the U.S. - originated. They want to determine whether it was raised elsewhere and simply deposited in the pond, perhaps by a pet owner or fishmonger - the most likely scenario - or whether it was bred in the wild. The latter scenario poses a greater threat to our waters......