SNAKEHEAD, THE SEQUEL.(The Talk of the Town)

The news the other day that the snakehead fish, voracious pond-dominator and alleged traverser of dry land, had turned up in local waters was generally bad, at least for the other fish (and frogs, turtles, and perhaps even fowl) now destined to be devoured by it. But still: snakehead! Who can deny experiencing a little thrill? Three years ago, sightings in Maryland, in a pond behind a Dunkin' Donuts, inspired ominous scenarios; capable (it was said) of walking, or at least of propelling itself along the ground, with its pectoral fins, the snakehead would stride from waterway to waterway, leaving a blighted continent in its wake. Instead, the scare subsided, and, well, the walking thing sort of turned out not to be entirely true.

But now the snakehead--the northern snakehead, Channa argus, which is native to Asia--has come to New York City, by what conveyance no one knows. Scientists with the state Department of Environmental Conservation recently netted five of them in Meadow Lake, in Flushing, Queens, during a routine survey. The picture in the paper, of two torpedo-shaped carcasses laid out next to measuring tape, called to mind mug shots of criminals you've come to root for. It didn't take long for a fisherman or two to start trying to think like a snakehead.

"I'm gonna bring some earthworms," Edwin Valentin, a master flytier at Urban Angler, on Fifth Avenue, said last week, after being persuaded to serve as Quint in a Queens-bound party of three. (Gary Ford, of Fort Greene, furniture-maker and saltwater fisherman, was guy No. 3.) Valentin lives in Bushwick and has been plying these metropolitan waters for more than thirty years. His only experience catching snakeheads is on PlayStation.

The crew convened early Thursday morning at dawn, in the parking lot of the Queens Museum, and proceeded to the northeastern corner of Meadow Lake, a vast but shallow man-made pan of brackish green water, bounded by expressways. The shore was littered with duck feathers, bottle caps, chicken bones, hot-sauce packets, car parts, and coconut shells. Fishing was prohibited, but the only Parks people around were landscapers jousting each other with weed whackers.

A halfhearted chumming effort (a doughnut, a fish stick) brought forth no surface activity. Valentin and Ford rigged up. "I'll try a white grub," Valentin said, tying on a wormy lure. "Here we go." He cast into the lake, reeled, then cast again. A bend in the rod indicated a strike: garbage bag, the first of many. The line snapped. In this way, perhaps, the snakeheads, without lifting a pectoral ...