Animal · Germany, Austria, Hungary
Common carp
Cyprinus carpio — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The common carp is a heavy, golden fish with four whiskers on its lips, and it roots through the mud on the bottom for food. Those whiskers are called barbels, and they can taste and feel what is buried in the silt. Carp came first from rivers in Europe and Asia, and people have carried them to ponds almost everywhere else.
Picture credit: Ffish.asia (CC BY 4.0) · Ermell (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the common carp live?
Home: Warm, slow rivers and weedy lakes, originally in Europe and Asia.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: usually 40–80 cm long, up to about 1.2 m. It weighs about 5 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
A carp feeds with its head down and its tail up, sucking in mouthfuls of mud and sorting out the worms, snails and insect larvae before blowing the rest back out. It has no teeth in its jaws at all; instead it grinds its food with hard teeth in its throat against a bony plate at the back of the skull. Carp were kept in ponds by Roman farmers and later by monasteries, which is how they reached most of Europe. Fish keepers bred some with hardly any scales, so a mirror carp has only a scattering of big shiny ones along its side. In warm summers carp spawn in shallow weed, splashing loudly, and a large female can release a million eggs. They live a very long time: one wild carp was found to be 64 years old. Where they have been let loose far from home, they stir up the bottom so much that the water turns cloudy and the plants die back.
Find it on the globe
Common carp is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why do carp have whiskers?
The barbels are covered in taste buds. A carp pushes them through soft mud to find worms and snails that it could never see in such murky water.
Are carp good or bad for a lake?
In the rivers they come from, they simply belong. In lakes far from home they dig up the bottom and cloud the water, so many countries treat them as a pest.
Can a carp survive in warm, dirty water?
Better than almost any other big fish. Carp cope with low oxygen and can gulp air at the surface, so they survive in ponds where trout or pike would die.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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