STOCKED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS. When the Doobie Brothers sang of jumping catfish in Black Water, they did not envision the Asian carp that are currently dominating the Mississippi River food chain.

Retired fish farmer and onetime Arkansas gubernatorial hopeful Jim Malone is by all accounts the first person to import bighead and silver carp from Asia in the early 1970s, but a Journal Sentinel investigation revealed that he promptly handed the fish over to government biologists, and he likely had nothing to do with their initial escape into the wild.

Blame the government for that. Even the EPA itself.

The truth, much of it buried in Malone's personal papers housed in the archives at the University of Central Arkansas, is that there are loads of tax-funded culprits tied to the four species of Asian carp - bighead, silver, black and grass - that have now invaded U.S. waters. By and large, the people who unleashed these fish on our environment were well-intentioned government and university biologists who thought they could find a job for the giant foreign fish that are so devastatingly good at stripping nutrients from the waters.

Their goal was to replace chemicals with carp. It was to employ the fish for weed control, or to give them a job cleaning up sewage lagoons and chronically fouled waters on fish farms. They also hoped to cultivate a fresh food source for an increasingly crowded planet.

They had no concept at the time, but they were tinkering with a type of biological fire that escaped their laboratories and is now raging uncontrolled across the continent.

What they did doesn't make sense today, but "I don't think we should be too harsh," said Carole Engle, director of the aquaculture center at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.

"What are we doing now that 30, 40 years from now somebody is going to look back and say: 'What stupid fools!'"

These fish are now within a few miles of the Great Lakes, taking advantage of the Illinois Waterway.

It's worth noting that the Lake Michigan sport fishery relies heavily on non-native varieties of salmon that took well to the fresh water, and that had an appetite for alewives. Here's today's trade dilemma: suppose these carp have a naturally-occurring predator that is native to the waters of ... North Korea?