Wildlife & Related

[hatidua]

Awesome fish! What a beast! Do you eat those suckers? If so, how do you prepare them?

I actually don't but I've found that fish preferences are entirely regional: the Japanese love raw bluefin tuna but you couldn't pay an NC commercial fisherman to eat raw fish even though the giant bluefin are being caught in NC (and then FedEx'd overnight to Tokyo). In Seychelles, I watched a waterfront fish market sell off all of their jacks and barracuda rapidly, and the dolphin (mahi mahi/dorado) languished in the sun all day, nobody wanted that species! Amberjack is popular in New Orleans but considered trash fish in the mid-atlantic, etc.

There was an online link I saw in the past few weeks on the preparation of carp. So, yes, people do eat them and I've seen them in the refridgerated case at Pacific Ocean Market in Broomfield. Granted, there's stuff available at Pacific Ocean Market that is challenging even to look at, much less eat...

As far as distribution, I think there are mirror carp in just about every pond and lake in CO and WY. I've only caught a handful of the "common" carp, everything we seem to catch are the mirror carp. And I have no idea where the babies hang out, I've yet to catch one that is really small, they all tend to be fairly respectable in size. I've not caught any that are in the really upper rungs of what's possible (they get past 60#s), but there are plenty of fish that are big enough to get well into the backing.