Carp – The Most Loved, Hated Fish In The World
"CARP"
That name evinces some strong emotions.
- If you're from the Western World, especially North America, the name just might make you cringe.
- If you're from Asia, Russia or Japan, your emotions probably border on reverence for the carp.
The fact is, most people either love them or hate them, all depending on where one is from.
Scientific Stuff
Carp belong to a family of fishes known as 'Cyprinidae,' or more commonly, 'cyprinids.' This family includes the carps, the true minnows, the barbs and barbels, and their many relatives. There are 3,000 known cyrinid species, with1,270 of these still in existence. Nearly all are freshwater species, with a few inhabiting marine environments
This makes Cyprinidae the largest and most diverse family of fishes on the planet, and the largest vertebrate animal family overall. They range from some of the smallest vertebrates known (1/2"), to the huge, "giant barb," at nearly 10 feet in length.
The family name is derived from the Ancient Greek kyprînos (κυπρῖνος, "carp").
Cyprinids are found as native species in North America, Africa, Europe, Eurasia, and Asia proper. The common carp with which most anglers are familiar, Cyprinus carpio, is native to the Danube basin in Eastern Europe. But it has been transplanted into the U.S.... and pretty much everywhere else in the world. This has helped to make carp the most widely distributed freshwater fish in the world.
It is this species which is generally most important to anglers, and so it's the one to keep in mind as we progress.
Unique Physical Attributes
Cyprinids have no stomach, and their jaws are toothless.
To ingest their food, they break it down by using gill rakers, specialized gill structures at the back of their throats. The familiar pumpkinseed and shellcracker sunfishes do the same thing.
These pharyngeal "teeth" allow the fish to make chewing motions against a hard plate formed by a bony process of the skull.
In short, we chew our food in the front of our mouths; carp do it in the rear.
Their feeding strategy is simple:
1. Suck in whatever might be food with their prehensile mouth
2. Spit out what they don't like, or don't recognize
3. Pulverize what they DO want before swallowing.
These strong pharyngeal teeth allow fish such as the common carp to eat hard foods such as snails and bivalve mollusks. The pharyngeal “teeth” are also unique to each species and are used by scientists to identify species.
Hearing is a well-developed sense in the cyprinids, and it can rightly be called their primary sensory method.
In their heads, they possess structures called, “Weberian ossicles,” which are three specialized outcroppings of vertebrae. These bones are attached to the gas bladder and transfer motion within the bladder to the inner ear.
Thus, the air bladder picks up sounds in the water, sending them directly to the ear. You can think of it as a built-in microphone and amplifier.
Now you know why its hard to sneak up on these fish.
The cyprinids are also able to gulp atmospheric air to fill the gas bladder. This means they can breathe air from above the water to a limited degree, although this is more pronounced in some species than others.
Breeding
All fish in this family are prolific egg-layers, and most do not guard their eggs. They mature within 1-3 years – and the females produce large numbers of sticky eggs in the Spring (up to 1.5 million for a 6 kg fish).
She deposits her legion of eggs on plants or detritus, usually in shallow water, and the males fertilize them immediately.
The eggs hatch four to eight days later.
Most eggs and larvae die before they ever reach adulthood, which is good, because there would be WAY more carp than already exists if they lived!
But to offset this high mortality rate, carp make up for it with sheer numbers. Floods seem to provide especially favorable conditions for carp breeding as well as abundant food for juveniles. This may help explain why carp experience population explosions following large floods.
Under captive conditions, carp may live more than 40 years. They average about 14-20 inches in length, and several pounds. However, when managed for longevity and growth, they may grow to more than 40 inches and 50 pounds.
In winter the carp becomes torpid, retires to the bottom, and stops feeding.
Feeding
Cyprinids, as a whole, can be found feeding mainly on invertebrates and vegetation at the bottom of the water in which they live. This makes sense since they mostly lack the teeth and stomach of other fishes. However, some carp species, like the yellowfish of Africa, or the mahseer of India, are predatory in the main.
Many "regular" species, too, like the rudd, or our friend the common carp, will prey on small fish when individuals become large enough.
But by and large, carp are mostly grazers of the bottom, something like cattle or hogs. It is this tendency that most carp anglers take advantage of when catching them. Nonetheless, they also take a wide variety of foods, as Nature provides.
Everything from fallen mulberries, to both aquatic and terrestrial insects of every kind are on the menu. Carp are also eager to take most small critters like frogs, crayfish, and small fish. To say they are opportunistic feeders is no understatement.
Some cyprinids, such as the grass carp, are specialized herbivores; others eat algae and biofilms, some specialize in snails, and still others are specialized filter feeders.
For this reason, specific cyprinids are often introduced as a management tool to control various factors in the aquatic environment, such as aquatic vegetation, or diseases transmitted by snails.
They are also adept at living in shallow, algae choked eutrophic lakes..., where they exacerbate the problem by eating the creatures that feed on the algae. Often, outright removal of the carp is the best way to clarify the water.
At the same time, we must address the elephant in the room - the carp can have a negative impact on the environment by its presence.
Its habit of rooting around the floor of a body of water increases the turbidity (muddiness) of water, which in turn reduces the ability of predator fish, such as pike or walleye, to see their prey.
This also reduces the amount of sunlight received by plants in the water, which stunts their growth - sometimes significantly.
Once the plants are impacted, so to are the species that depend on those plants for food, cover, and spawning areas.
Due to their prolific breeding, carp can quickly crowd out other fish with their numbers, as well. Thus, the health of numerous small lakes and fisheries has suffered from the presence of the carp.
Food For People
Carp, despite their typically bad press in the West, remain highly important food fish to human populations around the world.
They have been domesticated and reared as food fish across Europe and Asia for thousands of years.
In China, this has been pursued for at least 2,400 years, as evidenced by a tract by Fan Li, from the fifth century BC. In this work, he details many of the ways carp were raised in ponds.
The Romans built special ponds in which to raise common carp near the delta of the Danube River in Romania, and they in turn spread the fish throughout Europe.
In Austria, during the 1700's, the Schwarzenberg princes maintained 20,000 acres of carp ponds.
But, as the Industrial Revolution and its accompanying higher standards of living took hold, a wide variety of fish species became more readily available for the table. Thus, the demand for carp and its culture in Western Europe and North America has fallen off.
Fish such as oceanic fish, and farm- raised trout and salmon are now preferred.
However, outside of these regions, carp production in ponds is still a major form of aquaculture in Central and Eastern Europe, Mesopotamia, and the Russian Federation, where most of the production comes from small-scale ponds.
In Eastern Europe, they are often prepared with traditional methods such as drying and salting. In recent decades, canned and dried processing, and the appearance of affordable frozen fish products has made the carp a less important food fish than in earlier times.
Nonetheless, in certain places, they still remain popular for food, as well as for recreational fishing, and have been deliberately stocked in ponds and lakes for centuries for this reason.
In Asia, the farming of carp continues to handily surpass the total volume of sea-caught and ocean farmed species, such as salmon and tuna.
The various species of carp raised for food in land-locked countries, in particular, are often the major species of fish eaten. They grow fast, large, and convert feed efficiently, making management outside of fast-flowing rivers common.
In fact, "masgouf," a marinated, fire-grilled carp is considered the national dish of Iraq!
Several cyprinids have been deliberately introduced to waters outside their natural ranges to provide food, sport, or biological control for some pest species.
For example, the common carp was selected for introduction into the United States, en masse, starting in 1877. It was specifically chosen as a food fish, to help stave off the sharp decline of native fish stocks after a century of intense exploitation. Basically, we had eaten up the native fishes, as our population expanded, and we need a replacement.
Under Ulysses S. Grant, the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries began an intensive effort of carp cultivation and by the end of the 19th century, the fish was found pretty much everywhere. Ironically, the same Industrial Revolution that changed the face of Europe had taken root here, and we suddenly shunned the carp as food as the 20th Century came in.
Today, there remains a strong prejudice against them in the U.S., even as the carp teem happily wherever they are found
Grass carp are another species cultivated for food, primarily in China. But they have been introduced in Europe and the United States for aquatic weed control, eating up to three times their body weight daily in freshwater vegetation. 1963 marks the year the species this dal purpose species was first imported into the U.S., from Taiwan and Malaysia. It is still stocked in many states as an effective biocontrol for undesirable aquatic vegetation. Most of these fish are sterile, triploid-chromosome fish which cannot reproduce. However, similar fecund species have gotten into our native waters and are growing in numbers, threatening the watersheds of the Great Lakes..., and the lakes themselves.
Ironically, the greatest promise for keeping carp numbers in check in our native waters hearkens back to when carp was considered a great, renewable food source. What I mean is, if we again cultivate a taste for them, and a market to fill the demand, we can both feed a nation and provide a check upon their population.
The Anglers Friend
Around the world, carp are popular target species for anglers, especially for match fishing, due to their size and numbers. The common carp, Cyprinus carpio, is particularly favored because of its size and strength.
In 1653 Izaak Walton wrote in, “The Compleat Angler...,
"The Carp is the queen of rivers; a stately, a good, and a very subtle fish; that was not at first bred, nor hath been long in England, but is now naturalized."
In Europe, even when not fished for food, they are eagerly sought by anglers, being considered highly prized coarse fish that are difficult to hook. The UK has a thriving carp angling market. It is the fastest growing angling market in the UK, and has spawned a number of specialized carp angling publications and informative carp angling web sites.
In the United States, carp are also classified as a rough fish, but have long suffered from a poor reputation in the United States as "trash fish" - undesirable for angling or for the table. They are also viewed as damaging to native and naturalized species, although with some grudgingly accepted sporting qualities.
Nonetheless, many states' departments of natural resources are beginning to view the carp as an angling fish instead of a maligned pest.
Groups such as The American Carp Society, and the Carp Anglers Group promote the sport and work with fisheries departments to organize events and others to the unique opportunity the carp offers freshwater anglers.
The Future
With the expansion of our population, and more an more people getting into angling, there must be a review at some point of what fish we manage and make available.
With all the good points offered by carp, and with the bad ones managed well, it may be that the common carp is the next American sportfishing phenomenon. There are already some inroads along these lines, and me personally, I don't think it can come too soon.
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