Our pond place is closing for the year, because of intense construction in the area, and the fact the owners haven’t had a vacation in ten years. So we went to see if there are any fishes that would be worthy successors to our lost ones. Mind, we still haven’t gotten the bridge up, but I’ve got a Scarecrow mounted and a winter cover on the deep end of the pond, and we’ve had no further losses. We’re hoping to get the bridge built by week’s end…
We also thought it would be good to put Ysabel and Eushu in the car together for a relatively short trip. So we did. They did pretty well: Eushu was tolerably good, Ysabel was tolerably patient, and we didn’t have WWIII in the car.
We found only two fish that appealed to us, one that’s sort of like Grant was: that’s Grant II, a very handsome fish; and one that’s a little like a cross between Banichi and Yoruichi—a butterfly-finned black fish with bright gold/bronze edges, that we call Banichi. We put them in, and we’re just being careful until we can get the bridge up and give them shelter.
Mostly survived the holiday camping trip; glad to hear of your 2 new fish! Let us hope they survive the eagle better than their predecessors.
Happy new fishies! Happy to read that Jane feels well enough to go out a bit. (An inferred assumption,I know. 😮
We appear to be running a froggy bordello! We went out around midnight to get something out of the yard and stopped to look at the pond. Flashlights did not interrupt what can only be described as an orgy better left in the dark. I didn’t know we were so attractive! 8)
Jane’s been *feeling* much better since the transfusion. But by the nature of the thing, she’s forbidden to exert much at all. So she’s frustrated. But there was no way on this green earth I’d have let her risk going to that convention this weekend.
Froggies, eh? We’d love to have frogs. Right now I’m battling algae, nice soupy green algae.
long term, algae is best countered by a balance, my pool guy tells me as I continue to fish soupy green algae out of my swimming pond, a balance between plants that take up nutrients, and managing said plants so their dead remains don’t feed the nutrients back into the system ….I have a natural phosphate filter for all incoming water, but it got bypassed for the first year or so until we found the leak; tankers bringing water to top up the pool (my bore-hole couldn’t cope with the loss rate) could not wait for the slow process of putting the water through the filter.
didn’t you use water hyacinth for just that reason?
Don’t some kinds of catfish eat algae — like those sucker fish you put in an aquarium?
The koi would eat them, alas. Koi eat algae, themselves—and about anything else that will fit in their mouths, but what we’ve got is not the edible or palatable sort. I’ve ordered something that allegedly absorbs nitrate and phosphate out of the pond–we’ll see if it works! If you read a fertilizer bag, you find both chemicals: and if you live in a farming area, it’ll be in your drinking water.
maybe put some ghost shrimp in your pond? they’ll eat the algea and the koi can snack on them. they are extremely cheap like 1 cent per shrimp.
I’ve been strongly considering shrimp, water fleas (daphnia), etc, but the problem with having a critter eat the algae and poop back into the pond is that the nitrate and phosphate go back into the cycle, and if I can get something to uptake the phosphate so it can be thrown out, that will help a lot.
Heheheh, I knpw all about those froggy bordello orgy happenings. Well, not precisely *all*; some things are, I’m quite sure, only of interest to other amphibians. However, I know just what can happen if a pool’s pH or filters get out of whack in frog breeding season: You get over-run with a plague of frogs of near Biblical proportions, and lusty frogs *everywhere*, but the worst, and what Moses neglected to report, was the *sound*, the cacophony of crogs of all sorts, croaking their little throats out, en masse. It gets hard to sleep. Eventually, over a period of days, all civil thoughts toward froggy-kind disappear into a swampy green chorus….
Tonight, I ventured to mention your koi developments to my grandmother. Whereupon I had to explain what koi are, and a desciption of a koi pond, and, no, one should not ask one’s host if koi are…edible…it is not…ah, one must not… Just…no…!
I finally got across the concepts of koi, a koi pond, and a general idea of a Japanese garden.
That calls for a quote.
“Spring peepers, the noisiest frog per half inch that Dag knew of, had taken up their earsplitting chorus in the farm’s woodlot and pond when he rounded the corner of the barn to make his bedtime patrol. He stopped short when Whit called unexpectedly over the racket ‘Wait up, Dag!
His tent-brother, a lantern swinging from his hand, fell in beside him. Whit cocked his head, listening to the peepers. ‘Maybe I could stuff cotton in my ears tonight. I’m sure glad I didn’t have to court Berry by squatting with my naked tail in a puddle and screaming for hours till she took pity on me.’
Dag choked on a laugh. ‘You just had to put that picture in my head, didn’t you? Maybe that’s why the lady peepers pick their mates. To shut them up.’
‘That makes a persuasive sort of sense, you know?’
(Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Horizon)
talking of ponds and frogs … my swimming pond in Spain now has such a large frog population you can hardly hear yourself think. grass snakes help to keep the population down, but are not popular with swimmers … but the frogs eat mosquitoes, so I have to just relax and not mind the noise – you can hear it in the house all day and night!
Here in Georgia, Spring/Summer wouldn’t be complete without “a little night music” from the frogs and the cicadas – though I guess that should be cicadae…Anyway, they lull us to sleep.
If daphnia ‘fed’ an algae bloom via excretion, I’d not be seeing clear-water containers several days after filling them with koi/goldfish pond water (green) and daphnia. I get clear water (and lots of daphnia to feed my inside fish). I just received 3 more species of daphnia to experiment with…that’ll be fun.
I have one pond that has green water because I don’t have enough parrotfeather established yet. My other two aren’t a problem (are balanced with bioload/plants). I don’t mess with chemicals or hardware….but I have a low bioload and lots of plants.
Putting shrimp into a green water environment won’t help since they eat multicellular algae (the stuff that grows on a substrate). I use red cherry shrimp (RCS) extensively in my inside tanks for this purpose. I choose this shrimp because it will breed in a FW environment without going through a planktonic stage or requiring a brackish environment for larvae. And just this week I hear that at least in the Seattle area, RCS are hard enough to go outside and can even survive our winters. Don’t know about the more severe eastern Washington environment.
I use several species of Daphnia and Ceriodaphnia as well as FW copepods outside and these remove single cell algae from the water column. All are readily available as cultures via mailorder. If you are less interested in ordering, they can be collected locally.
I’m for the daphnia, but I have an aggressive filtration system that might play hob with them, if they operate near the surface (pool-quality skimmer). We have finally found a pond place that has water hyacinth (weather has skunked this area re pond plants.)and that will help.
You’ll probably filter out quite a lot of your daphnia with that kind of hardware. Mine are in a unfiltered water body with no circulation. They distribute throughout the water column but often congregate in little dancing daphnia balls.
AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH! Just figured out the my pool skimmer is leaking. Proge suggests we buy a cheap kiddie pool to keep the 800 gallons of water I need to pump out to replace said skimmer. Sounds like a thunder storm is on its way. NOT the time to be standing in 3ft. of water. At least it’s easily fixed.
Froggie chorus very subdued last night. May be due to the weather; too nasty to go out and look.
Thunderstorm just hit us on north side of Boston about 10 minutes ago and has now stopped (for the moment).
I’m contemplating daphnia for my small, indoor tank if the 3 goldfish don’t eat them all: we have lovely clear water but small green algae growing on the tank sides and the miniature collaseum that that is their “home,”
Also contemplating daphnia if they eat mosquito larvae for my small outdoor pond if they can withstand a few journeys through the small pump, up the tube and back down the little “stream bed,” but there is plenty of space they can escape from the pump’s pull.