Carp seem to be taking over the World?

[odes20]

Hey just saw a docu on TV tonite of how Feral carp are taking over a lot of American waterways.
I was down at Chinchilla last week and all the locals can't believe how many Euro carp are in the Condamine and its tributaries since the big cleansing floods. hardly a yellowbelly or cod being caught anywhere.

Does anyone know if anything is being achieved to stop these bludgers anywhere in the world? Like genetic intervention? making them sterile or something?


John

[Feral]

The daughterless carp program looks pretty good, they have managed to clean out a few waterways with it down south.

[Outdoor Guy]

So how does that work Feral

[red toga]

its mentioned in the latest carp control policy. basically they introduce females that produce male offspring in an attempt to beat out the females. i have doubts it would work all that well. cleaning them from a dam is comparatively easy. move efforts to a river system that has other stocks that can be connected during flooding and the problem would come back. carp are one of the best invaders in the world.
even if they introduced the KHV- a virus, the stocks would die back and then replenish later.

[red toga]

http://www.biotechnologyonline.gov.au/enviro/carp.html

there is some info in the link above. an enzyme is manipulated to try prevent females developing from the egg. hence mostly male fry eventuate. as you can read, this is not always successful. i think nature will find a way and in the end would balance back out. it also says that it would take decades of implementation and along with other measures to be effective.

they have done this with tilapia culture so that mostly males are produced. its something like 98 percent males in a batch. what might happen, is you will have a lot of males around and a low percentage of females. i doubt its enough to stop the populations.
carps live for decades.. so those males live for decades and any females that survive from pre daughterless technology will still produce hundreds of thousands of eggs. then some percentage of new young fish will be female and also will breed for many years to come.
now those fish, that should have a change in enzyme making the fry turn into male are an exception. whats to say that their offspring wont all hold the same "ingrediant" to become just as female even with the introduced stocks all around.