Just bad planning. Fish farming (catfish, etc.) was being promoted along the Mississippi in the '70s and '80s to produce a cleaner meat than was was being fished out of the river. Catfish can basically live in a mudhole, so the Asian carp was introduced to keep the ponds clean. While not on the floodplain, the problem was that many of the farms were up on T-1 or T-2 terraces, which do flood in cycles like 50-year and 100-year floods.
Carp don't need a whole lot of water in which to survive or get around. I was out in parts of Nebraska, which even the natives there consider the boonies in the '80s, up in the headwaters of Otter Creek which flows into the Republican River which flows into the Missouri, then to the Mississippi. We saw carp swimming upstream in water to shallow that their dorsal fins were sticking out, and also some that were trying to jump a short pond retaining wall that was overflowing. We nicknamed those "Nebraska salmon".
BTW, even the commom carp is a non-native species introduced from Europe in the 1800s.
Yep, game over. I spent nearly 20 years in Florida and we had the same problem with iguanas, pythons and Noo Yawka's.
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