I would doubt it, anyway how would they verify it, did they drain the lake down to the mud first????, genetically there is no difference, its still cyprinus cario, the wildie is the original carp, king strains are the varieties, you still hear of secret untouched waters with wildies ina and although its possible, its inprobably. If you think about it, how easy would it be to stock a private pool with long learn canadian commons or spanish commons and claim them to be true English wildies, i`m not saying this happens of course, but were money is involved, well you tell me?
interestingly the first 6 listed species are all the same one cyprinus carpio, does matt and mick understand the difference between species and varieties I ask myself???
Ah I see what you mean geoff, so why call them species then refer to them as varieties??, still I`m only being pedantic, i`m sure they know their stuff. and the piece is only gimmicy anyway??
of interest though, to quote, Wild carp are the original strain of common carp imported into Britain during medieval times, old Ike walton also recond this, however other lines of reseach suggest the Roman may have brought them over much earlier as a food source, i`ve read somewhere that pharangeal bone structures have been found on Roman encampment diggings, I suppose my Monk ancesters may not have been the first to introduce them?? Carp being available in the Roman times and the Dark ages??
My own thoughts on what could be classed as a wildie are were a pool has existed for a long time.....possibly hundreds of years and so have the carp in it, without interferance from "king" strains.
Nick, would i be right in thinking these may be desendants of original medieval British carp?
Either way....sorry Claudia but yours look like commons, with out doubt.
I used to fish a couple of Midland waters that , as far as i knew, held genuine wild carp.....they were far longer in the body than todays carp, almost hungry chub shape, and very dark across the back.
The water i used to fish had wildies and i had them up to 6lb.....and they went like a rocket ship. In fact , they were the first carp i ever caught. I remember fishing with a small arseley bomb trapped between 2 shot - a very basic fixed lead rig.....not very safe in these modern days but i was only 14 and it was 1982 !!! I had 5 grains of sweetcorn impaled on a size 12 hook and the bites were registered by the handle of my Intrepid Black Prince reel suddenly going into overdrive.
By the way , and to get back on topic , they were very long , narrow fish , almost barbel like in shape
My own thoughts on what could be classed as a wildie are were a pool has existed for a long time.....possibly hundreds of years and so have the carp in it, without interferance from "king" strains.
yes thats right Paul, although not quite a straight forward of course, suggestions are that the romans stocked, possibly unintentionally , carp into the UK, after this (because we know little about the dark ages because of a lack of documentation), it was the Monks who were known to cultivate carp and these were introduced over many hundreds of years, so you can see already we have a large time scale for carp to become endemic, thus all we can safely say is a wildie is a carp which was introduced into this country prior to the modern day gentic modification period and introduction of the king strain varieties, say circa 1900s onwards (I`m not sure when the first introduction of king varients was introduced, but wildies in different waters lived along side them until king varieties became more widespread and the gene pool ameliorated as the kings radiated and bred with the endemisis sps, the original endemisis appear to have survived until around the begining of the 70s, essentially the wildies is only separated by time, originally it was separeated by time and space, two of the basic ecological principles
Nick, would i be right in thinking these may be desendants of original medieval British carp?
yes possibly so paul, any introduced in Roman times would have likely changed and not be exactly the same variety, although i could be wrong on this??
Either way....sorry Claudia but yours look like commons, with out doubt.
I used to fish a couple of Midland waters that , as far as i knew, held genuine wild carp.....they were far longer in the body than todays carp, almost hungry chub shape, and very dark across the back.
I know the periods you was fishing of course paul and I would think these would have been wildies you was catching, I know quite a few midland waters in the 70s still held wilides and I think i`m corrct in saying that a greater concentration of Medievel stew ponds existed in the Midlands.
I think what you have to bear in mind the possibility of even 1 solitary successful fertile egg on one birds foot, dropped in a wilidie pool and the gene pool is most likely lost forever, it really is that basic. The likelyhood of true British wildies surviving until the 80s is very unlikely indeed. and I`m fairly sure anyone more in the seventies will be unlikely ever to catch a British wildie, you may of course catch long lean commons that look for all intent and purpuses wildies, they may even fight like them, but they wont be.
I don't get this 'all wild carp populations have been tainted by the presence of king carp' doom and gloom. A carp's egg can only be fertilized by one of the attendant males, and when carp spawn there is usually three or four males to each female. In a mixed population with both wild and king carp strains, every 'pairing' with a king female will produce some true kings and some king/wildie crosses; every pairing with a wild female will result in some true wildies or king/wild crosses. Thus in a population split 50/50 between kings and wildies the fertilized spawn of any one year can be predicted as approximately 25% true wild carp, 50% crosses and 25% true kings.
If this was all there is to it, over successive generations the wild carp percentage would indeed reduce to nothing. There is however another factor; survival rates. The wild carp is a product of millions of years of evolution and carries with it a significant ability to survive extreme conditions that would kill the less adaptable strains which are the product of a mere century or two of pisciculture. The most dangerous period in any carp's life is the first winter; here in the UK we are right on the edge of the carp's natural climate range. The shortfall in numbers outlined above is thus compensated by the increased survival rate of the wild variety.
There remains the problem of identification in waters where you can conceivably have true kings, true wildies and a cross between the two, which is where this thread first started. However, there are photos of all three types already on here so I don't see the need to clutter it up with yet more images.
To completely eradicate wild carp from a water through cross-breeding with king carp strains is virtually impossible to achieve in principle, though I daresay it could happen in practice if the correct sequence of events occurred. The only way to come close to creating a completely king carp population in any water is by continually topping up with true kings. In waters where no stocking of carp at all occurs over a number of years, the wild strain re-asserts itself, eventually taking over completely. The first king carp characteristics to be lost are the mirror variety. Redmire initially produced mostly mirror carp for the first fifteen or so years after Bob Richards caught his big fish, but by the beginning of the Jack Hilton era there were as many commons (mostly low twenties) which were almost certainly the offspring of a successful early spawning. By the middle seventies a further succession of spawnings had resulted in so many small commons that the pool was netted to remove them. As far as I can recall, only one small (i.e. under 10lb) mirror was caught in this time.
The biggest threat to wild carp survival is not the introduction of a few kings here and there, but through the actions of misguided angling clubs and fishery managers repeatedly stocking waters with fat, pale-looking mirrors, F1 hybrids and any other carp-like fish they can lay their hands on, soley for the purpose of making their particular water the best baggin' puddle around.
The strain will eventually be diluted out tho Fred.......and i'm not sure your offspring breakdown is a scientific fact...........breed a mongrel with a thorough bred and you get all mongrels.
But when folk start talking wildies and double figure fish it is usually because king carp had a pushbike nowadays.
many thanks for your input however its not quite as simple as that, what we need to remeber is carp are not indegionous to our shores, the wildies however became endemisised by mans introduction and as such did not have thousands of years to evolve, therefore because it was separated by space from the original strain, it lost fitness to the source, the king introductions were fitter than the original wildies and as such polluted the gene pool. You cant breed two mongrels and make a pure, it doent work like that Fred, its a one way street I`m afraid and opf course you can only cross breed species that the same specie, but I know what you mean of course. Wilides in the sense we are discussing here can never reassert themselvces, you wilkl however eventually get a carp of fully scaled type which has reverted back, albeit with a modified gene pool. It is of course difficult putting forward a scientific argument to support the wildies, all we can do is suggest how genetics operates based on present scientific understand. The understanding being that a mogrelisation x a mongralisation does not produce pure, how can it????.
