The golden crucian carp, once considered a common freshwater fish in Ukraine, has now almost disappeared from many rivers in the country. This was stated by Yulia Kutsokon, an ichthyologist at the I.I. Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in an interview with "Telegraph".
According to the scientist, at the beginning of the 20th century, the golden crucian carp from the cyprinid family was widely distributed throughout Ukraine. However, the situation began to change in the middle of the last century, when, during the creation of artificial reservoirs, silver crucian carp began to be introduced into water bodies en masse.
" We still don't know for sure whether the silver crucian is indigenous to Ukraine or whether it was introduced even earlier — including to Europe ," Kutsokon noted.
According to one hypothesis, the silver crucian simply replaced the golden crucian, although, as the scientist specifies, the problem is deeper: the golden crucian requires special conditions for spawning - floodplain reservoirs, not deep reservoirs with rotting plants.
" In reservoirs, where plants are constantly flooded and rotting, goldfish fare much worse ," the expert explains.
Previously, this fish could live up to 10–12 years, but today its numbers have fallen critically. Now the golden crucian carp has survived only on the Desna River and in some floodplain reservoirs, and even then in very small numbers.
The disappearance of the golden crucian is another signal of the ecological degradation of natural water bodies caused by human intervention in natural hydrosystems. Experts urge not to ignore these changes, as they may have much broader consequences for Ukraine's biodiversity.
