Not to be confused with Cyprididae, a family of freshwater ostracods. Cyprinidae is a family of freshwater fish commonly called the carp or minnow family. Cyprinids are stomachless fish with toothless crucian carp. Even so, food can be effectively chewed by the gill rakers of the specialized last gill bow.

These pharyngeal teeth allow the fish to make chewing motions against a chewing plate formed by a bony process of the skull. Hearing is a well-developed sense in the cyprinids since they have the Weberian organ, three specialized vertebral processes that transfer motion of the gas bladder to the inner ear. The vertebral processes of the Weberian organ also permit a cyprinid to detect changes in motion of the gas bladder due to atmospheric conditions or depth changes. Cyprinids are native to North America, Africa, and Eurasia. The bitterlings of subfamily Acheilognathinae are notable for depositing their eggs in bivalve molluscs, where the young develop until able to fend for themselves. Cyprinids contain the first and only known example of androgenesis in a vertebrate, in the Squalius alburnoides allopolyploid complex. Unlike most fish species, cyprinids generally increase in abundance in eutrophic lakes.

Here, they contribute towards positive feedback as they are efficient at eating the zooplankton that would otherwise graze on the algae, reducing its abundance. Several cyprinids have been introduced to waters outside their natural ranges to provide food, sport, or biological control for some pest species. Carp in particular can stir up sediment, reducing the clarity of the water and making plant growth difficult. In America and Australia, such as the Asian carp in the Mississippi Basin, they have become invasive species that compete with native fishes or disrupt the environment. Cyprinus carpio is a major pest species in Australia impacting freshwater environments, amenity, and the agricultural economy, devastating biodiversity by decimating native fish populations where they first became established as a major pest in the wild in the 1960s.

AD and after it arrived there in 1502, also in Japan. Other popular aquarium cyprinids include danionins, rasborines, and true barbs. It has become the standard model species for studying developmental genetics of vertebrates, in particular fish. The massive diversity of cyprinids has so far made it difficult to resolve their phylogeny in sufficient detail to make assignment to subfamilies more than tentative in many cases. Part of the solution seems that the delicate rasborines are the core group, consisting of minor lineages that have not shifted far from their evolutionary niche, or have coevolved for millions of years. These are among the most basal lineages of living cyprinids.

Other “rasborines” are apparently distributed across the diverse lineages of the family. The validity and circumscription of proposed subfamilies like the Labeoninae or Squaliobarbinae also remain doubtful, although the latter do appear to correspond to a distinct lineage. The entirely paraphyletic “Barbinae” and the disputed Labeoninae might be better treated as part of the Cyprininae, forming a close-knit group whose internal relationships are still little known. Eurasia in large numbers, is unusual. It is most often grouped with the Leuciscinae, but even when these were rather loosely circumscribed, it always stood apart. 1 supports the view that it is distinct enough to constitute a monotypic subfamily.

A DNA-based analysis of these fish places the Rasborinae as the basal lineage with the Cyprininae as a sister clade to the Leuciscinae. The subfamilies Acheilognathinae, Gobioninae, and Leuciscinae are monophyletic. The tench, Tinca tinca, is of unclear affiliations and often placed in a subfamily of its own. Froese, Rainer, and Daniel Pauly, eds. First empirical evidence of naturally occurring androgenesis in vertebrates”.

Effects of common carp on water quality and submerged vegetation: results from a short-term mesocosm experiment in an artificial wetland”. Mirror carp, regionally known as Israeli carp, are a type of domesticated fish commonly found in Europe but widely introduced or cultivated elsewhere. Common carp have an even, regular scale pattern, whereas mirrors have irregular, patchy scales that have little to no overlap, making many fish unique and identifiable by sight. Leather carp are another variety of common carp that resemble mirror carp, but are permitted a few scales either along the dorsal line or the wrist of the tail. The most striking difference between mirror and common carp is the presence of large mirror-like scales on the former. The mirror-scale phenotype is caused by a genetic mutation present at one of two scale trait loci, denoted by their S and N alleles, respectively. The “S” locus has been identified as containing the gene encoding fibroblast growth factor receptor Fgfr1A1, which was duplicated during the course of carp evolution and consequently does not typically produce lethal phenotypes when only one locus is mutated.