Talk:Bighead carp

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I think it'd be great if someone would expand this article. It's certainly a very important topic; it's right up there with Chinese mitten crabs and snakehead fish in terms of invasiveness. Isopropyl 07:42, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

I have never edited anything in Wikipidia, but this article on bighead carp needs quite a bit. I am an author on an in-press book which will be the bible on the ecology of Hypophthalmichthys species, so I guess I am qualified. I'll try to find time to get to it, but I'm very busy these days and I'm having trouble figuring out the mechanics of editing. But first off, that fish in the picture is NOT a bighead carp. It is a silver carp. —Preceding unsigned comment added by User:Carptracker (talk • contribs)

I have replaced the image of silver carp with a bighead carp now, and made several other improvements. More when I can find the time. Carptracker 21:17, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

I just undid the change that someone (not signed in) made to say that bighead carp jump in response to moving boats, like silver carp. They do not. This information is aprocryphal, although many believe it to be the case, partly because the two species are often difficult for anglers to distinguish, and partly because occasionally the two fish hybrize and a fish that looks like a bighead carp, but is a hybrid, will jump. Hybrids of the two species are common and can closely resemble either parent species, but can be identified by their gill rakers, which will be deformed. Both bighead and silver carp have highly specialized, but very different, gill rakers, and the hybrids have gill rakers that are intermediate and appear deformed. THe Kolar et al. reference given in the article discusses this in detailCarptracker (talk) 22:47, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Invasive species

This article gives no evidence that this species has or may cause any detrimental effects to the environment other than "sometimes" decreasing the catch of rarer or more valuable fish. In this citation, there is no evidence cited that the fish have caused ANY negative effects in the Americas, or that the fish have consistently caused negative effects where they have been introduced elsewhere (they do note several beneficial effects that have been observed), There is no citation after the claim that they are "considered a highly destructive invasive species in the United States", and no explanation for this is given. My conclusion: this claim is the product of xenophobia and nativism, not science. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pinus jeffreyi (talk • contribs) 19:33, 5 September 2011 (UTC)