Recently, Middle Georgia State University had a groundskeeping issue of sorts -- nothing too detrimental, but enough that it tainted a big landmark on campus.
When Middle Georgia State University's landmark lake went from nice blue water to practically a green slime bed, grounds superintendent Michael Glisson knew he had a problem.
"Oh, yeah, we had mats and mats of weeds out there and a lot of algae plumes and some very stringy weeds out there, and some of the birds would get their legs caught up in it," he described.
So Glisson and the school called on an unlikely ally, one that would attack the problem from below the surface.
"There's roughly 500 carp out there and they're going to town, so," Michael said.
In just a couple of weeks, the funny-shaped fish have chomped their way back into blue water.
Carp don't eat worms or other live animals -- they're vegetarians -- and the school did have some carp in the water, maybe just not enough.
"So we had 200 and they did good, but this year, we had that explosion of that aquatic vegetation," Michael said. "And we had to add some more and some of the bigger bass in here would kind of some of those baby carp so the numbers weren't multiplying like we had originally thought, so we had to go and just dump some more in."
But pretty soon, those babies will get too big for the bass to pick on.
"They get really big -- I've seen some of them up in here can get 24-36 inches. They'll be every bit of five to six pounds and get even bigger than that," Michael said, hopefully bringing big appetites to the table for years to come.