LMAO!!!! That is so awesome!

LMAO Bubba, that's awesome.

Donny I had a carp the last trip with a hump. I thought you did to. I remember talking about the hump on the carp.

So that means there are more carp than I remembered with the hump, cool! So now we have to figure out why Fork/Sabine River system has Quasie buffs and carp. If they are growing too fast for their head does that mean there is an over abundance of mussels, bugs, larva, crawfish, or all of the above???... I did notice a 'lipstick' wearin buff in one of those pics and someone once told me that is from downing a load of crawfish...

If you guys can't tell, I'm really bored at work and I need something to research!

So I found a little college experiment. Basically they fed a high protein high oil diet to one set of carp for 5 weeks and the other group were fed normal nutritional value foods. The high protien high oil fish grew on average 10% more and had much more fatty deposits and from the pics it looks like it is has fatty deposits in it's shoulder area.

Ok, so there might be a high nutritional value food source on this river system but what is it?

Here's the link http://www.newtonangling.com/documents/Are%20we%20killing%20our%20carp2-1.htm

Brilliant research! Thats awesome.

One day in late Jan or early Feb Justin and I walked over to, what is now known as the, Little Britain swim. The mussel shells at the shore line were almost 10 inches deep!

This past session more than one of us noticed cracked mussel shells in the nets indicating that they had been eating them.

I did some online research about mussels the week before last and I found out that the south eastern region of the united states is the fresh water mussel "capital of the world" so to speak. There are more of and more kinds of them here than anywhere else on the planet. I would be willing to bet that the Sabine is the sweet spot within this mecca making it even more special for fresh water mussels.

Thats my guess anyway.

yeah same at athens HUGE mussels beds

I wonder if it's the sheer numbers of mussels available or a certain type of mussel that has hump forming nutritional values!

Nice research!

I'd agree on the mussels, they are everywhere there, and at least one of my carp was "dumping" broken mussel shell chunks into the net lol.

I'd go with numbers, as they look the same as freshwater mussels we see anywhere else...but I really don't know.

So I've been asking Koi people why they think it is and the majority of their responses is genetics. The availability of food is only helping the genes show. For example, this Koi has a huge hump behind the head the resembles a Quasie buff. He said at one time it was a perfect specimen, shape-wise..

Wow!

You have WAY too much time on your hands at work.

Uh yeah. There's word of layoffs next week so everyone is sitting around doing nothing...

I think Starless has it, food supply.

It is a known fact that lack of food, or too many fish for the available food supply, can cause large heads with small bodies. It stands to reason the opposite would be true.

The steroids washing into the lake from all of those cattle feed lots upstream probably doesn't hurt any.

Kevin