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Carp lay in the bed of a trailer after being pulled from Utah Lake during efforts to reduce carp population as part of the June sucker Recovery Implementation Plan on Thursday, Jan. 27, 2011.

MARK JOHNSTON, Daily Herald file photo

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Utah Lake looking west from Saratoga Springs is shown in June 2024.

Curtis Booker, Daily Herald

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The Utah Lake Authority is challenging avid local anglers to add a New Year’s resolution to their list: help remove carp from Utah Lake.

The ULA is including the public in its ongoing battle against the nonnative fish species by hosting a year-long competition in 2025.

Dubbed “The Great Carp Hunt,” teams of up to five anglers are invited catch and remove as many carp as possible.

The contest will begin in February and run through November. It will involve monthly two-day fishing events, typically on the last Saturday and Sunday of each month.

The event will rotate around various lake locations and offer a number of cash prizes, including a $1,000 prize to teams who catch the most carp in a month and a $5,000 grand prize to the team that catches the most carp in the year.

There also will be monthly and annual prizes for other categories, including longest carp caught, heaviest carp caught and smallest carp caught, among others.

Sam Braegger, the deputy director of the ULA, said the contest is just one of several measures the lake authority has taken in recent years to remove the carp, which negatively impact the lake’s ecosystem.

A study in 2008 estimated there were over 42 million pounds of carp in the lake. The species, which was introduced to the lake in the 1880s, used to take up to 90% of the lake’s biomass.

Braegger said the state has worked heavily to remove the carp in the last 15 years. Between 2009 and 2019, there was a major focus on fishing them out. Commercial netting companies have caught over 32 million pounds of carp since 2009, which has drastically reduced the carp population.

“Many people still think that the lake is overwhelmed by carp, but the most recent estimates I saw last year showed that from when they started removing it back in 2009, the population currently sits at around 50% of what it was, so there’s been great progress,” Braegger said.

However, the carp do remain an issue. According to Braegger, they are detrimental to other species in the environment, including the endangered June Sucker, and they also contribute to algae blooms.

The ULA is investigating other ways to manage the issue, including using different technologies the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources is testing. The competition is a way to supplement those efforts, and involve the public.

“We want to use it as a tool to educate the public, to raise awareness around the carp removal efforts,” Braegger said. “We also want to give a chance for them to be able to give back and participate in the effort. There’s a lot of anglers that are passionate about Utah Lake and want to help care for it, so we wanted to provide a fun way for them to do that.”

Registration has yet to open for the event, though people can sign up to get a notice when it does open. Once available, the participation fee will be $20 per person for the entire year.

The locations for each competition also are unannounced but will likely rotate around the lake’s five public marina locations: Utah Lake State Park, Lincoln Beach, Saratoga Springs Marina, American Fork Marina and Lindon Marina.

“Between those five, we’ll move it around in order to attract different people from different locations to make travel a little bit easier,” Braegger said.

More information can be found at utahlake.gov.