Distribution:
Southeast Asia, Africa, North America and Europe.
Habitat:
Freshwater lakes and streams, very rarely in brackish water.
Remarks:
This very large family includes the minnows, carps, barbs, barbels, shiners, gudgeons, chubs, dace, squawfishes, tench, rudd, bitterling and bream, the Southeast Asian "sharks", golfish, koi, danios and rasboras. Many of these fishes are important as food fishes, however, they are also a large part of the aquarium trade and are instrumental in biological research. The zebra danio, for example, is not only a popular aquarium fish, but is also the standard research animal for the study of developmental genetics. Some members of this family are polyploid, having multiple sets of chromosomes.
Carps have thin lips, with no fleshy bumps (papillae) or folds (plicae). However, the mouth is sometimes suckerlike, and sometimes barbels are present. Carps have 1 to 3 rows of pharyngeal teeth in 1-3 rows, with less than 9 teeth in each row. They are the first fishes to develop pharyngeal dentition and among the first fishes to develop a highly protrusible upper jaw. The upper jaw is often only bordered by premaxilla (the maxillary bones are usually absent). The anterior and posterior chambers of the swim bladder are connected by a sphincter.
The maximum lengths acheived by this family are those of Catlocarpio siamensis and Tor putitora, reaching 2.5 m and 2.7 m, respectively. However, most species in this family are under 5 cm in length.
The cyprinids are the second largest fish family after the gobies, and the largest family of freshwater fishes comprising about 220 genera and approximately 2,420 species.