Friday, January 10, 2014

Creature Feature #84: Carp


The Carp Family includes numerous species of oily, freshwater fish. This fellow is the Common Carp, naturally widespread across Europe and Asia, he has also been domesticated, insofar as fish can be domesticated, and introduced into various waterways throughout the world. Here he has made a bit of a pest of himself. He is an ominvore, and rather a messy eater: destroying, uprooting submerged vegetation, and his excretion contains undigested plant matter which fouls, raising the nutritional level of the water and encouraging algae growth. He also devours the eggs of other fish and is considered one of the #100 worst invasive species in the world.

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