Well, the carp huggers have two choices.
1. Pool your money together until you have the billions necessary to capture and relocate them to asia.
2. Start killing them to preserve our native game fish populations.
Otherwise, you are a hypocrite. Releasing a few bass is pointless of you are turning a voracious invasive scavenger loose on them as well. It may make you feel better about yourself, but in reality, one carp can kill millions of bass eggs per year.
I am the one of the biggest local pond fisherman in this parts. So my opinion is based only on observation. With that being said, I think the carp in the local ponds is the greatest kept secert there is. There big and fight real hard and bite year round. As far as hurting the bass population in the local ponds, don't the bucket fisherman do the real damage. Think about it for a minute, there's carp in all the local ponds and bucket fisherman yet the bass still survive. Don't forget about the comorants, I see them eat so many baby bass in the fall it makes me sick. So how much damage do the carp really do in the local ponds, I would say not enough to worry about, so make sure you C&R all of them, because they sure are alot of fun to catch.
Last one I caught was,about 25lbs at Legg Lake,when I got it to the shore there was at least 3 others the same size rolling and following the hooked one.
I was fishing for bass and did not want to keep it,since I always see people there fishing for carp,to keep,I just started walking with the fish and had two people who fortunately wanted it.
I myself would have not throw it in the trashcan,if not released I would just hope we could find a more noble use for this hard fighting fish.
I'm talking about the common carp we catch in our local lakes and ponds,not the Asian flying carp.
Cya Tuna Vic
Well I can say one thing about the carp the bobcat's and coyote's love um, I've seen many times they are hunting in the shallows during the spawn.
Examples so far have been inner city lakes and I am not familiar with the populations of carp in those lakes, I am familiar with many other lakes that definitely have a population issue. Big bear has had to reintroduce SMB and LMB because of population crashes and the biologists there are all over trying to remove as many carp as possible and I think the same is true for Elsinore and certainly is true for Silverwood, between the stripers and carp the LMB's are doing a good job of surviving at Silverwood but I think Silverwood's forage is ridiculous so there is enough life to support it, just my observations and no science behind it.
One largemouth bass can lay up to 20,000,000 eggs in a single season. One carp can eat ALL of them in a matter of minutes. Your observations cannot give you a proper frame of reference on this. You don't see the damage, because the fish are never born. If you think the bucketeers are worse than the carp, you are a little confused. They do not remove millions of bass from the ecosystem in a single sitting. There have been plenty of scientific studies done on this, and it has been determined that common carp are detrimental to all North American waters they inhabit. Your observations differ from those of the scientific community.Originally Posted by etucker1959
Tunavic, the common carp is an Asian species as well. They were brought to America in the 1800's as a food source. They were introduced to our waters accidentally when flooding inundated an aquaculture farm near the Mississippi. They have since proliferated at a rate that no native fish could ever keep up with.
Do you guys actually think that throwing a few carp up on the bank is going to significantly affect the overall well-being of a particular lake? I have fished local lakes for over fifty years, and they've always had carp in them. In that time the carp still haven't overtaken the other species of fish. And bass fishing is about as good as it has ever been.
By the way, since there was mention of the bass populations being impacted, tell me what kind of an impact tournament fishing has on the bass populations. Are you going to tell me that the survival rate of those fish is high? The only thing those fishermen are thinking about is getting big fish, and having them still wiggling at weigh-in.
Last edited by vortec_cruiser; 09-12-2012 at 07:54 PM.
It's sad how people think about those carp, from what I've seen they can be invasive but they are not as invasive as you guys think. They are tough fish, but they are vegetarian at most of the time. Dont see what they have done to the bass population, but I do have seen a lot of poacher at the city park lakes, in stead of killin the carp for no reason please bowfishing some poachers. Dont call us the hypocrites, think about it, carp doesnt consume more bass eggs than the bluegills, why don't you call the bluegills invasive?
You are right Tunavic, i havent seen those big head carp anywhere around in our local lakes, they are dangerous, not the commons.
Do you have a biology degree, or did you just stay at a Holiday Inn Express? Carp DO raid nests whenever the chance presents itself. Contrary to popular belief, carp are not vegetarians. They are omnivorous, and will happily eat eggs, crustaceans, insects, and even fry from time to time. A bass can chase a bluegill off its bed. Not a 20 pound carp. "Don't see what they have done to the bass population." You have never seen their population at the appropriate level, so you have no basis for comparison. As for "poachers" taking all the fish, look up some old black and white fishing photos from the region in the early 1900's, before the carp were established. You'll find plenty of pics of stringers with 20 bass, all over 5 pounds, and those guys would go out and do this EVERY week without putting a dent in the population...
Seems to me that if angler take was the issue, then these guys would have ran out of fish really quick with all the fish they kept. Most bass anglers these days C&R. Something else is to blame here.
If you have ever observed a largemouth bass bedding when the carp are in the shallows the LMB's go absolutely nuts chasing away carp, it is more than obvious the LMB's know that the carp are a threat to their eggs/fry, even if you aren't a biologist and just an obervational fisherman you should know this.
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