Blake W. Sauey
Jon Amberg
Przemyslaw G. Bajer
Joshua R. Poole
2018
<p><span>Strategic use of oral toxicants could allow for practical and sustainable control schemes for the invasive common carp (</span><i class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">Cyprinus carpio,</i><span><span> </span>or ‘carp’) if a toxicant selectively targeted carp and not native species. In this study, we incorporated antimycin-a (ANT-A), a known fish toxicant, into a corn-based bait and conducted a series of experiments to determine its toxicity, leaching rate, and species-specificity. Our results showed that ANT-A was lethal to carp at doses ≥ 4 mg/kg and that the amount of ANT-A that leached out of the bait in 72 h was not lethal to carp or bluegill (</span><i class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">Lepomis macrochirus</i><span>). Species-specificity trials were conducted in 227 L tanks, in which carp were stocked with three native species representing families that occur sympatrically with carp in our study region: the fathead minnow (</span><i class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">Pimephales promelas</i><span>), yellow perch (</span><i class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">Perca flavescens</i><span>) and bluegill. These trials showed high mortality of carp (46%) and fathead minnows (76%) but no significant mortality of perch or bluegill. Finally, a pond study, which used the same species composition except for fathead minnows, resulted in 37% morality among adult carp and no mortality among perch or bluegill. Our results suggest that corn-based bait that contains ANT-A could be used to selectively control carp in ecosystems dominated by percids or centrarchids, such as lakes across the Great Plains ecoregion of North America, where carp are especially problematic.</span></p>
application/pdf
10.1007/s10530-018-1662-y
en
Springer
Assessing the efficacy of corn-based bait containing antimycin-a to control common carp populations using laboratory and pond experiments
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