9 June: Carp

The second week in June is National Carp Week. 10 things you might not know about carp:

1. They are a freshwater fish belonging to the Cyprinidae family. They are related to goldfish, koi and minnows.
2. A common carp can interbreed with goldfish. The result is called a Kollar carp.
3. Carp are native to Europe and Asia, including the Black Sea, Caspian Sea and Aral Sea. Because they were an important food fish, they have been introduced all over the world except for the poles. However, in the USA and Australia they are now considered an invasive species.
4. The Romans used to farm carp near the delta of the Danube River in Romania. The farming techniques were also used by monks throughout Europe between the 13th and 16th centuries.
5. Although tolerant of most conditions, common carp prefer to live in large bodies of slow or standing Water and soft, vegetative sediments. It is because they stir up mud at the bottom of rivers and streams, thus making them dirty, that they are considered to be pests.
6. Traditionally, anglers weren't particularly interested in carp because they didn't believe they'd be much of a challenge to catch, unlike Trout. Hence they were classified as “trash fish”. In time, however, a few anglers realised that they were actually quite tricky to catch and began calling them “freshwater bonefish.”
7. A female carp can lay 300,000 eggs in a single spawn. They spawn in the spring as a rule, but can, if conditions are favourable, spawn several times a year. Hence one carp can lay over a million eggs in a year. Only a tiny proportion of these will survive to adulthood though as they are preyed upon by many other creatures including other fish such as the northern pike and largemouth bass, cormorants, herons, goosanders, and ospreys) and mammals such as Otter and mink.
8. Humans eat them too, although they are less popular as food in Western Europe and America than in Eastern Europe and China. In Hungary, Czech Republic, Austria, parts of Germany and Poland, carp is traditionally eaten on Christmas Eve, either fried or made into soup. It's fairly common for a family to keep a live carp in a Bathtub before killing it to eat, because this is supposed to make it taste less muddy. This is discouraged nowadays, however, because it is likely to cause unnecessary suffering to the fish, and the fish might fight back and injure someone.
9. Common carp can eat a herbivorous diet of aquatic plants, but prefer to scavenge for insects, crustaceans, crawfish, and worms.
10. Carp are fairly long lived, if they can escape being made into Christmas Eve dinner. They can also grow quite large. Wild adults reach weights of 30 or 40 lbs and a length of 1-2 feet, but farmed ones can grow even bigger. A carp weighing in at 91lb was caught in France in 2017.

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