CRYPTOLINK: What can we learn from America’s snakehead woes?

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Copyright © Brian Gratwicke, Creative Commons

The world is going to end, if you listen to the fever-pitched American journalists. Aquatic death almost certainly lurks in every pond and stream, in the form of the Northern snakeheads. We have much to fear, and our friends and families will surely all be eaten by this unstoppable menace, bearing down on us as Barbarian hordes bore down upon the Roman empire.

I kid you not. The way the stories have been handled, anyone would be terrified to walk within 50m of any pond or stream, for fear of some pseudo Loch Ness monster suddenly flopping out of a tangle of bamboo and ingesting their dog, collar and all.

Tragically, most tabloids reporting on the subject don’t even know what a snakehead is.

In some of the weakest pitches I’ve ever seen, I have come to suspect they genuinely believe it to be at best some lab-derived hybrid, at worst a menacing antediluvian hangover. The way they describe it, it comes across as some crude affiliation of snake and fish, and an animal that has all the worst elements of a Great white shark, cunningly blended with the venomous subtleties of a King cobra.

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