Cyprinids have pharyngeal teeth for grinding food before swallowing and a continuous gut with no discrete stomach. This digestive tract structure, as well as the feeding behavior traits shown by cyprinids, makes it difficult to identify and measure the amount of food consumed by these fishes. The relations among quantity of food in cyprinid gut, time after feeding and predator size were described by log-linear multiple regression. The number of intact American shad (Alosa sapidissima (Wilson)) larvae eaten in laboratory experiments was estimated by extrapolating the regression for the amount of food in the gut over time for predators of various size. The numbers of larval American shad in guts of fish captured in the Juniata River, Pennsylvania, were not significantly different from those estimated with the equations derived from laboratory data. In view of their abundance in rivers and their potential digestion rate for larval fish, cyprinids can be expected to have a marked influence on reducing the numbers of larval American shad.
