On the 22nd of June 2022, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources issued a joint announcement from Springfield stating that the four species of invasive fish it had been trying to remove from Midwestern waterways for the previous four decades would from that day be marketed to the American public under a new name. The four species (bighead carp, silver carp, grass carp and black carp) would collectively be known as copi. According to the launch statement issued through the Invasive Carp Regional Coordinating Committee, the multi-agency body coordinated under the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the new name was a compression of the word “copious,” picked to signal how many of the fish were now in the country’s rivers. A Chicago branding agency called Span had spent more than two years running consumer research, interviews and focus groups involving over 350 Illinois residents to arrive at it. Twenty-one chefs and retailers had committed to putting copi on their menus or shelves by the launch date. Fourteen processors, manufacturers and distributors had signed up to make copi products available.
The fish itself had not changed. What had changed was the state’s operating theory about what would actually reduce their numbers.
How the invasion actually happened
The animals were brought into the United States in the 1970s to help clean aquaculture ponds in Arkansas and other Southern states, where their filter-feeding on plankton and algae was seen as a low-cost biological solution to a technical problem. Flooding and accidental releases through that decade let them escape into the Mississippi River system, where they had no natural predators, no historical parasites, and no established competitor for the ecological niche they occupied. According to the U.S. Geological Survey’s Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin, which now runs population-level modelling of the two most numerous species, bighead and silver carp had spread into the Illinois River by the 1980s and now make up as much as 90 per cent of the fish biomass in some sections of the invaded waterways. In doing so they starve out the native filter feeders, most of which sit at the base of the food web supporting native game fish, mussels and diving birds. Silver carp in particular have the unusual habit of leaping several metres out of the water when startled by boat engines, and have caused a growing number of injuries to river users through the region. The fish that Illinois is now trying to sell as copi were, until 2022, one of the largest ongoing ecological problems on the American mainland.
Why physical removal has not been enough
The problem the rebrand was designed to address is not a problem of biology. It is a problem of scale. On the accumulated evidence from two decades of federal, state and interstate control programmes, mechanical removal by contract fishing crews, electric barriers on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, sonic deterrents and lock-and-dam modifications has managed to slow the range expansion of the fish but has not been able to reduce their standing biomass in the invaded rivers to anything approaching pre-invasion levels. The Illinois DNR estimates the harvestable annual biomass of copi in the Illinois River alone at 20 to 50 million pounds, with hundreds of millions of pounds more available across the wider Mississippi system. The stakes downstream of the electric barriers are large in dollar terms as well as ecological ones: the Great Lakes support a commercial and recreational fishery estimated at seven billion dollars a year and a tourism industry estimated at sixteen billion, both of which are at risk if the fish reach Lake Michigan. Removing tens of millions of pounds of copi year after year at a rate faster than the population can replace itself is only economically viable if there is a market willing to buy them once they are on land.
In the absence of that market, government-funded contract fishing is essentially the only way to remove them, and that is expensive, slow, and politically fragile.
What Span actually did, and the historical parallels
The reason Illinois needed a branding agency and two years of consumer research rather than a straightforward marketing campaign is that “carp” is a name American consumers have long associated with muddy-tasting bottom-feeders, despite copi being a top-feeder that eats plankton and has clean, mild flesh. The rebrand also had to sidestep the label “Asian carp,” which the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists and the American Fisheries Society had never formally adopted, and which Asian-American legislators in the Midwest had raised objections to on the grounds that pairing the word Asian with an invasive species being violently killed on camera was doing damage to their communities. Span’s process, involving surveys of Illinois residents, produced “copi” as a name that tested well on brevity, pronounceability, and lack of prior negative association. According to the consumer-facing brand site the IDNR launched alongside the announcement, which the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch programme has listed as a recommended sustainable choice under its silver, bighead and grass carp entries, copi is now being pitched to shoppers as a wild-caught, mild-flavoured, mercury-safe white fish with heart-healthy omega-3 content. The historical precedents Illinois cited when explaining the strategy included several fish whose commercial fortunes had turned on their names. Slimehead became orange roughy in the 1970s and grew into a substantial international fishery. Patagonian toothfish became Chilean sea bass around 1994. Mud crab became peekytoe crab. Illinois has applied to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to have copi formally recognised as a market name and has moved to register the word as a trademark, so that industry groups can develop their own quality control standards around it.
What the record actually shows so far
Progress since the launch has been real but is still small against the size of the underlying problem. Distribution deals were signed at launch with Gordon Food Service, one of the largest foodservice distributors in North America, and copi has since appeared on Chicago menus and in fresh-fish sections of Midwestern retailers. The critique that environmental groups including the Alliance for the Great Lakes have raised in response is essentially that while a commercial fishery is welcome, it cannot on its own be relied upon to prevent copi from reaching Lake Michigan, and that the more consequential piece of infrastructure remains the Brandon Road Lock and Dam project on the Des Plaines River south-west of Chicago, which is being built to a design combining electric barriers, acoustic deterrents, air-bubble curtains and a flushing lock intended to keep the fish out of the Great Lakes drainage. On the strongest current reading, the copi rebrand is neither a solution on its own nor a distraction from the physical infrastructure. It is one of the two things the state is doing at the same time, and its function within the wider strategy is to make the ongoing removal of the fish a business proposition rather than a permanent public expenditure.