With all these sensors, and because sound is transmitted exceptionally well through water, carp can easily hear us talk and wade. Any sounds you or your equipment make can be detected and cause most carp to be alarmed and probably stop feeding, at least temporarily.

Carp also have highly developed senses of taste and touch on their heads, mouth, and barbules. The skin around their snouts and noses is especially sensitive and is called tongue skin, and for good reason. As they root for live foods, anything that comes in contact with this skin is analyzed for its edible potential.

Carp lack teeth but have a tough mouth skin that is ideal for holding a hook. They capture most food by sucking it in. They then chew or crush hard-shelled foods like crayfish, clams, and snails with crushers located in their throats. Because of this lack of teeth or sharp gill plates, carp are safe to handle around their heads. However, they lack the jawbone structure needed for lipping them or using BogaGrips.

They have one sharp and serrated-edged spine on the dorsal fin. It seems a danger more to cutting tippet or tangling in landing net mesh than puncturing or cutting your hand. There’s actually no convenient handle on a carp, so use a big net or beach them, and then carefully cradle them with your hands during release.

Carp seem fairly immune to mortality from hooking and handling, and they cope well with being out of water for a short time. I call them stainless steel fish. Of the hundreds of carp my wife Emily and I have caught, we’ve never seen one go belly up after release. They usually zoom away as if nothing happened.

Carp, though quite bony, are edible but seldom eaten by fly fishers. They live long and feed on bottom-dwelling foods, so they tend to accumulate and store manmade pollutants like PCBs, heavy metals, mercury, and pesticides. Anglers in the Great Lakes and some other polluted water systems should eat limited amounts of carp, or none at all.

Carp Foods
Carp are omnivores but they prefer live animal foods such as aquatic insects, crayfish, worms, snails, clams, leeches, minnows, and fish eggs. They readily supplement their diet with aquatic plants, algae, terrestrial plant fruits, and seeds.

Carp also eat manmade foods like canned corn, cereal, bread, dog food, doughballs, popcorn, and fish pellets. Where there is high human traffic, such as around boat launches, docks, and ponds in public parks, carp can become domesticated and congregate to beg for junk food handouts.

Carp are not only smart, they’re opportunistic.

Finding Carp
Carp are designed to feed close to the bottom using their senses of smell, taste, touch, and sight--in that order. This requires that their food remains stationary or moves slowly. When water clarity is high, they occasionally use their vision to feed above the bottom on faster-moving emerging insects or schools of minnow fry.

Diehard carpaholic Bob Grey, owner of Fly & Shot Outfitters near Cincinnati, recently took us to fish for carp that were surface feeding on huge schools of gizzard shad fry in an Indiana reservoir.