With the Federal Government's carp eradication program on hold, Aboriginal rangers in Queensland are leading a new trapping program to rid the Murray Darling of the invasive fish.
On the Moonie river near Thallon, in south-west Queensland, a team of Indigenous rangers have been setting specially designed fish traps to catch introduced European carp.
"We put them in for 10 days, and in some rivers we can get three or four hundred every time," William Taylor, team leader of Aboriginal rangers from the Southern Queensland Natural Resource Management (NRM), said.
"The biggest single catch we've ever had is almost 900 in one trap."
Mr Taylor leads a small team of rangers who are based at St George — 500 kilometres west of Brisbane.
Carp make up about 80 per cent of the biomass in Australia's river systems and cost the economy an estimated $500 million a year.
Equipped with one large net fish trap, since starting the pilot project in 2011, the rangers have pulled thousands of carp from river systems in the Balonne region in Southern Queensland.
Unique design maximises carp haul
The roughly 50-metre net is stretched across local creeks and rivers, and special bait is used to target carp.
"We have these wings that push them into the funnel and there's a big round tank on the end of them that's got a feeding thing that drops feed in every 20 mins and that attracts them," Mr Taylor said.
In October the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources put on hold plans to introduce a carp herpes virus.
Dubbed 'Carpageddon', the delay of the eradication program will give researchers more time to plan, and better understand the virus and its potential impact on native species.
Southern Queensland NRM's Geoff Penton said the potential issue with the virus was its success rate.
"One possibility is if the virus is approved to be released and safe, it might be 100 per cent successful, but in other countries it has been used it hasn't quite been 100 per cent," he said.
Mr Penton said even with a 95 per cent success rate, with so many carp in the system, and their ability to breed and survive, it would mean that the problem would only continue.
"So we might still be doing the netting as part of the mop-up operation," Mr Penton said.
High success rate
Mr Penton said the targeted trapping system worked.
"The carp netting has been successful in small areas," he said.
"We can't get to them all, but in certain small off stream billabongs we managed to achieved up to 85 per cent reduction in carp numbers.
"That give our native [fish] a really good opportunity to flourish in those small areas — the next time we have a flood, those natives can repopulate our rivers."
The team at St George hope the netting program can be introduced across the country.
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