It didn’t get nearly the attention last week that student loans and highway funding did. But the massive federal bill that addressed those issues also addresses Asian carp.

The Stop Invasive Species Act requires the Army Corps of Engineers to report by early October on its strategies to hold off the Asian Carp migration toward the Great Lakes.

A big part of Charles Wooley’s job is to track those carp. He’s with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and has been searching Lake Calumet, a dozen miles from Lake Michigan, for signs of the carp ever since one was discovered there two years ago.

“We go in with a very intensive response, using commercial fishing crews, electric fishing boats, large nets, seines,  all sorts of sampling equipment to see if we actually have any live Asian carp present,” Wooley says.

As far as the Great Lakes themselves, he says the fish have gotten no closer than a series of locks and dams south of an electrical barrier the Army Corps has already built to stave off the fish.

David Romano is with the Army corps. He says an increasing amount of Asian carp DNA has been found in the Chicago Waterways over the last three years. However, he says, it is hard to tell if the trend indicates the carp population is migrating closer to the Great Lakes, or it if could be something as simple as water flowing north from other areas where the fish already are established.

“We’ve actually gone out and used nets and electrofishing in areas where we’ve received that positive eDNA and have never been able to capture an actual Asian Carp through significant efforts,” Romano says.

Great Lakes governors and lawmakers worry that if the carp get into the lakes, they’ll wipe out the native populations and devastate the sport and commercial fishing industry.