I've eaten carp and they aren't as bad as you think. I used to shoot some small ones for my grandfather when he was still alive. My grandmother would fry them up, smoke them, pickle them and had a bunch of other recipes. They are a pain to clean- and my grandmother told me that I had better not ever bring another carp to her after gramps died.rofl
Smoking them is the best, and gramps used to say that a smoked carp tasted much better than a smoked trout. He owned a small grocery store for years and would have a couple of smoked carp waiting in back for some of his better customers.
A dive buddy of mine is from Prague and she said that they used to eat a Christmas Carp every year and it was considered a delicacy. I believe that is a different breed from what we have here.
As far as what they do to our lakes, well here's a story from the paper just this week:
Seize the carp from Lake Wingra
Bill Novak — 3/12/2008 11:09 am
Carpe diem, or "seize the day" in Latin, was turned into "seize the carp" Tuesday as commercial fishers and Department of Natural Resources staff hauled seine nets of the unwanted species out of Lake Wingra, a key step in a project trying to restore clarity to the lake water and help fish habitat.
Carp are considered the main reason for turbidity, or water cloudiness, in Lake Wingra, because their eating habits stir up sediments on the bottom of the lake, cutting off sunlight to desired lake plants needed to stabilize the lake bottom as well as suspending nutrients that fuel algae blooms.
DNR fisheries biologist Kurt Welke said the first netting brought up an estimated 6,000 pounds of carp, or about 1,000 fish.
Radio tracking over the past two years showed carp congregated in the deep central basin of the lake in winter. Tuesday, carp were extracted by pulling long seine nets under the ice, then taking the nets out of the water through holes cut in the ice.
Game fish, including muskie, were quickly returned to the cold water, while the carp were kept captive in the nets under the ice until the nets were pulled.
Commercial fisher Steve Kallenbach of Stoddard, Wis., and his crew will try today to gather more carp, attempting to determine if the numbers of fish make future carp nettings commercially viable.
"We want to pin down how large the carp resource is," Welke said.
DNR limnologist Dick Lathrop started a lake clarity experiment in the lake in 2005, enclosing a 2.5-acre section of the lake and removing the carp inside. The resulting clarity of the water in the confined area clearly indicated that carp suppression would help the whole 349-acre lake on Madison's west side.
Population estimates of carp in the whole lake, determined by gathering carp that had fins clipped two years ago by Welke, will be a deciding factor in determining whether or not removing thousands of carp will be worthwhile or a nonfactor in improving the fishery and water quality of Lake Wingra.
If the netting exercise shows the commercial fishers can remove a good portion of the carp, the seining will probably continue this year.
"But if the netting shows there are 50,000 carp in the lake and the commercial fishers can only remove 1,000 fish, that's not cutting into the problem," Welke said.
Welke will also be taking carp samples back to the DNR offices to do age testing on the species to see if the carp population is growing old or if it is made up of a majority of younger fish.
David Liebl of the Friends of Lake Wingra said pulling carp out of the lake will go a long way to making the urban lake a better body of water.
"We know removing carp improves water clarity and benefits the sport fishery as well as recreation on the lake," Liebl said.
