MADISON — While governmental agencies have put up barriers and are considering other measures to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes to protect their fishing industries, Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller is suggesting that federal officials need to be mindful also of what’s happening in Indiana’s rivers and streams.

Those bodies of water, especially the Lower Wabash River south of Lafayette, have also been invaded by Asian carp.

The carp are a threat to the Great Lakes’ multibillion dollar commercial fishing industry and could cause the loss of 800,000 jobs, officials trying to protect the lakes say.

There are two species of Asian carp in this part of the country; silver carp, which can reach 100 pounds and fly out of the water when they are startled such as by boat motors, and bighead carp, which can weigh up to 30 pounds by the time they are age 3.

Asian carp have no natural enemies, no predators waiting to do them in.

Asian carp were brought to the U.S. about 40 years ago to clean the algae and wastes in commercial catfish ponds in the South. Some owners of municipal sewage treatment plants also bought them in the 1970s with the approval of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to be ecofriendly cleaners of sewage treatment ponds, where there were algae and floating solids to eat.

Zoeller said the decades-later upshot has been disaster — as he said it has been with just about every other species brought in to the U.S. to control or eliminate a plant or animal problem.

When floods washed over the catfish ponds, Asian carp were freed from their boundaries and made the most of it. They swam up the Mississippi and other rivers, grabbed the food other fish needed, and kept on going.

They are not only an environmental problem but also a safety hazard, Zoeller said, citing YouTube videos of flying carp attacks on people in boats.

Biologists had warned for years that Asian carp would become an ecological problem before anyone officially paid attention, and many critics of the effort so far say the carp were already out of control by then.

Asian carp have voracious appetites. Their diet includes microscopic plankton, and bighead carp can eat at least half of their body weight a day.

The problem with their appetites is that very young fish at the bottom of the food chain also eat plankton, as do mussels and paddlefish. When their food is gobbled up by the Asian carp, other fish cannot survive or they cannot grow to be big enough for sport-fishing or commercial harvesting.

Asian carp reproduce in astonishing numbers, bringing on more and more invasive fish to dominate the food supplies and to crowd out native, desirable species. According to published reports, in parts of the Mississippi River that used to be rife with bass and crappie, carp now account for 80 percent of the fish in the water.

Although Indiana does not have as big of commercial and sport-fishing industries as the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River and other waterways, there is plenty of harm that Asian carp can do in the Hoosier state, Zoeller said Tuesday during a visit to Jefferson County. He and his family were boating down the Ohio River on a journey he said was a combination vacation and kickoff of his re-election campaign. He had breakfast with local Republicans, spoke to high school students in a summer program at Hanover College, met with people at the college’s Rivers Institute and stopped at The Madison Courier.

Professional bass angler Wes Thomas of Hanover can attest to the arrival of Asian carp in Indiana waters. They aren’t as numerous there as they are downstream at McAlpine Lock and Dam in Louisville — where he said they are jammed against the dam — and in Ohio River tributaries near Tell City, but they are coming, he said.

“I think they’re going to be a big issue before long even in our area,” Thomas said.

He first saw Asian carp when he was fishing in Paducah, Ky., five years ago.

“They were just thick,” he said.

“It’s just a matter of time before they get up in our pool [section of the Ohio River] here, and people are going to be real surprised the way they react to the engine noise,” Thomas said.

Last week when he was fishing in a tournament in Tell City, Thomas had just turned on his trolling motor while fishing in a creek when “I had about a 20-pounder almost jump in the boat.”

The Internet has many videos of silver carp jumping and stories of people who got slapped so hard they got a broken nose or broken arm, or were knocked unconscious.

“They could actually cause injuries to someone in a boat,” Thomas said.

In Missouri and Illinois, he said, some skiers wear armor to protect themselves from jumping silver Asian carp.

When a carp lands in a boat, he said, it is not pleasant.

“They’re slimy and they bleed,” he said. “It’s slime you can’t hardly wash off.”

He said public awareness of the Asian carp problem will increase when the fish are more numerous here.

“When your boating public gets to see these, they’ll be more aware,” he said. “They’ll hit the side of the boat, get up against the motor. They’re just everywhere.”

Others are making a profit from Asian carp. There are several commercial carp processing plants, including one in Illinois that as of early 2010 was processing 12 million pounds of carp a year in a 30,000-square-foot building. The carp sell well in ethnic markets in big U.S. cities and are also exported to China, Japan and other countries.

But most Americans have not embraced carp as a food because it has a reputation for eating nasty things, and it is bonier than Americans like to tackle on a dinner plate. Still, there are recipes online for fried, baked, smoked and pickled carp, for carp tacos and for ground carp patties.

Louisiana chef Philippe Parola, who has a consulting business, has described the taste as being a combination of scallops and crabmeat. There have been marketing efforts to try to make carp acceptable, and Parola is among those pushing Asian carp. Those efforts have included changing its name. Some restaurants call it silverfin on their menus. Researchers at Kentucky State University in Frankfort started looking into marketing it as Kentucky tuna.