Sounds terrible!
These fish may be eaten, if in Asia!

Invasive species - marine and terrestrial organisms, as well as disease pathogens - pose a much under-rated threat to the environment in Australia and globally. Economic activity directly produces and exacerbates invasives impacts, so chasing economic growth carries with it a responsibility to expand defence, eradication and control efforts against invasives. Global governance failure to take up responsibility for invasives is widely recognised but seldom tackled.

It is a perverse outcome of our economic system - via the WTO - that the vast majority of government anti-invasives effort is aimed at primary industry. However, as impacts of invasives increasingly compromise the health of the environment, societies will suffer losses - both cumulative and catastrophic - that economists can 'cost', as well as immense intangible damage. Our society has default settings to ignore intangibles, externalise costs and maximise 'profits' despite these same intangibles being essential to our survival and prosperity.

We all live within the same 'system' - costs cannot be externalised except through the legal fiction of a corporation created to extract wealth from 'the commons' for shareholder profit. As an example, the cleanest air in the world now contains a frightening cocktail of harmful, man-made chemicals. We have no idea of the combined, cumulative effects of the thousands of such new substances on the environment or even ourselves. Our children carry the ill-health burden of polluting the commons expressed as shorter, sicker lives than they might otherwise experience.

However, it may first be the damage done to the environment through our profligacy which brings society to our collective knees. In pursuit of the fairytale of economic growth, we continue to assault life itself through a vast array of destructive acts. Death by a thousand cuts, a million poisons, a billion blows - stealing away our common future.

In this mix of assaults on the life of the planet, invasive species are yet another pollutant of the commons. Unlike man-made chemicals, they don't degrade or fade away. Like the carp in this article, they breed, evolve and disrupt ecological function. The damage they do to the environment punches yet another hole in the fabric of life which maintains planetary conditions necessary for our very existence.