Carp to be removed ?

[Dick Dastardly]

Mathew,try Hanbury Wharf.Pub side about 1/2 mile past marina.

[C4RP3R]

ayjay:

I noticed a small piece (just an odd paragraph in another article) on the EA website which said they were thinking of removing  carp from rivers wherever possible.

 

Is this a good idea?

 

Will it affect your fishing?

It wont affect my fishing, because I never fish in rivers but bad on the people who do, looks like they'll be fishing lakes soon

[Andrew Burgess]

BUDGIE:

Mathew,try Hanbury Wharf.Pub side about 1/2 mile past marina.

I agreed with Budgie. I have caught load of carp in the past at Hanbury Wharf but it being a few years since the last time I went there.

[ridgeacre]

British Waterways stocked a lot of the canals in the midlands with carp over 25 years ago, know some stretches where they are 18lb +

[Dunk Fairley]

A lot of rivers were officially stocked with carp as well. In actual fact, quite a lot of waters were stocked with "odd" fish from time to time.

 

Sometimes it was a way of researching the lives of the actual fish. I know of one South London river, which was definately stocked with Rainbow Trout as an experiment, just to see if the rivers was capable of re-stocking with Roach, Chub etc. This was back in the 70s. I remember thinking at the time "why not just put roach in?".

[Tony U]

Rainbow Trout are cheaper and a better indicator of polluted water ie they will keel over and die quicker than roach if things like the oxygen levels aint right.

We are not talking about the Wandle here are we Dunk?

[Jim Gibbinson]

After the much publicised floods two or three years ago, a lot of carp escaped into the Beult, Teise and Medway systems.

 

All three rivers had self-sustaining carp populations before the flood, but these may have suffered due to the inadvertent introduction of disease. Monk Lakes lost a lot of its carp into the adjacent Beult (also sturgeon and barbel etc.) but they were by no means the only source of extra carp - all manner of riverside ponds (inluding garden ponds) lost fish.

 

My "mole" with Environment Agency contacts told me that carp losses in the Medway were considerable, dead fish showing up particularly in the vicinity of Farleigh. He said there were relatively few losses upriver of Yalding (where the Beult and, indirectly, the Teise enter). This is suprising because floodwater introductions occurred well upriver, too.

 

Removal of carp from river systems by other than selective disease is impossible - as my friend Steve Edwards so rightly says, "Carp are trying to take over the world"!

 

PS to Dunk: the E.A. almost always attribute carp deaths to "spawning stress".....

 

[ 04. April 2005, 11:21 AM: Message edited by: Jim Gibbinson ]

[Dunk Fairley]

I'm sure you're right there Jim, it's a soft option and avoids having to do too much actual work. Although one was put down to Otter predation.