Thank you very much.
I applaud your knowledge of Greek. “Limnos” is the Greek root for “standing water”, so limnology is the study of standing waters.
The award is named after a gentleman named Frank Rigler, who was a prominent limnologist first at the University of Toronto and then at McGill University. He died prematurely. I was an undergraduate student and got to hear a speech by him at my own undergraduate school when I was a fourth-year student. It's one of the few talks I ever have been able to recall hearing, and it was 30-something years ago. The reason I remember it is that he talked about Loch Ness monsters. His whole presentation was on why Loch Ness monsters couldn't possibly exist—there simply wasn't enough food in Loch Ness to feed monsters.
Now, the Asian carp clearly are a concern. What I can tell you is that we're not certain what the effects would be on the Great Lakes, so the best thing to do is apply the precautionary principle and keep them out.
There are two possible factors I've seen that might limit the success of the species in the Great Lakes. We think, based upon environmental modelling of where they currently occur globally, that similar types of habitats exist in the Great Lakes, so there's nothing such as temperature to keep them from doing well in the Great Lakes.
What could keep them from doing well is either the food limitation that you described—many of the areas of the Great Lakes simply do not have high enough productivity levels of zooplankton and phytoplankton to support large populations of Asian carp—or, it has been suggested, that the fish requires extremely long rivers in order to breed successfully. They discharge eggs, and the eggs float downstream as they're developing.
There are rivers on the Great Lakes that are sufficiently long, but overall I'm skeptical that these fish are going to eat the Great Lakes the way that people have suggested they are. The literature I have read suggests that this is unlikely to happen, unless they can feed on foods that we're not currently aware of. If they can feed on very small particles, then they may be able to obtain enough energy to do very well in the Great Lakes.
But certainly areas such as the Detroit River, western Lake Erie, and Lake St. Clair are habitats that would be prime for them—particularly western Lake Erie, because the amount of food available there is much higher than, say, in large parts of Lake Ontario or Lake Huron.