Do carp eat dead fish? I was thinking they mostly ate vegetation. I guess the likely eat anything.
Asian crap eat plankton which is why they take over an ecosystem. They grow fast and get large so they simply starve out the smaller fish which in turn starves out the omnivores.
Supposedly their diet makes them actually pretty tasty unlike other carp that feed off the bottom where algae and such grow. The taste is something like a cross between crab and scallops I've read. Speaking of that, I hope MicroBalog weighs in here. I hear it's a delicacy in Isreal so he's probably more likely than anybody else I know to have eaten it.
Which, oddly enough, Israeli's like of the fish is sorta the reason we've got a potential problem with them in the Great Lakes. A farm in Illinois was making money raising the buggers in ponds to sell to the Israeli market. The Mississippi river flooded, swept some of the fish into the wild, and now there are signs that they might be in Lake Michigan around the Chicago area as we're seeing their DNA there. I consider it an odd occurrence of events which amuses me, for reasons I can't quite pin-point, but I also entertain the notion that somewhere out there some idiot is blaming the whole thing on "the Joooooos!" And by "some idiot" I mean Mel Gibson.
I digress. Back to the main topic I fully support the notion of smacking the buggers with shotguns if they ever take hold here. I've been rolling load ideas around in my head and I think something like 1/4oz #12 shot buffered with some kind of inert powder (coffee creamer?) to fill the rest of a 7/8oz wad would do the trick.
