It hadn’t cleared appreciably, and new green algae started growing. Arrgh!f
This is where I put on my water chemistry hat and bite the bullet and get the (fairly expensive) phosphate remover. Or, as we say in the marine reef biz, don’t bother getting a test for phosphate. If you’ve got algae growth, you’ve got excessive phosphate and no ordinary test will show it, because it’s bound up in the algae.
So we killed off a megadose of algae, and here is bright green new algae within 12 hours. Speed of regrowth tells you something.
So rather than have this nastiness (nothing likes phosphate except plants: it’s not good for any motile creature) endlessly looping through the system, I bit the bullet, as aforesaid, and poured one more dose into the pond, which immediately turned it milky bluegreen.
The fish, however don’t seem to mind it, and are running around in it, which is better than they were doing in response to the other stuff, which I think must have stung, or stunk, badly.
This is not a case of filtering it out, but chemically wiping it out, as best I gather: in the marine hobby we use ferrous oxide granules, but this freshwater stuff is a liquid. And here’s hoping.
Jane opined a rabbitfish would be a great help in the pond with the algae situation, and then caught herself and grinned, and said: “I don’t suppose it would be very good for the rabbitfish.” Naturally no saltwater creature can work in there. 😉
We’ve had to top off so much because of leaks in the waterfall (now fixed) and we’ve had overflow, and then that huge influx of rainwater, and with a high phosphate level in our local water, well, it’s not a great surprise. So next year we get some water hyacinth (messy things) and hope to do a natural uptake, but it’s late in the season for that.
Here’s hoping.
Would this page help? http://ezinearticles.com/?Algae-Eating-Fish-For-Your-Freshwater-Aquarium&id=2427137
Tom
I fear they’d eat these poor fellows, even the plecostomus. But thanks—and welcome in!
hopefully this will get it cleared up and you can just enjoy the pond and fish again! are there any fresh water fish that will help with the algae level?
I think water hyacinth are lovely! Also they will give lots of shade to the water. True, if they grow fast you will have to haul them out to compost periodically.
Those long feathery roots, that are so good at sucking nutrients out of the pond, are also great as fish-fry shelter. The only year that my little pool’s goldfish reproduced was the year they had lots of hyacinth-root shelter.
I grew up with a pair of original Eames plywood chairs (late forties, antiques they say, now worth bundles) and I always thought water hyacinths must have been the inspiration for the shape of the chair backs and seats. http://www.modernclassicsdirect.co.uk/product.php?productid=16182
Unfortunately it’s illegal to send water hyacinths to Texas. If I wish to get some more I’m going to have to go collect them myself somewhere that they are a pest, or maybe I can find a pond shop in Oklahoma that carries them that I can make an expedition to. My pool is an above-ground construction in a patio, with no chance of escape into the waterways that are all at least a mile away. I would say that it gets too cold here in the winter for any to survive if it got out, but that’s no longer reliably true.
Nothing I’d dare put in there. I once caught a spiny Oklahoma catfish, which you may know can grow to three feet long and will prey on small ducks, etc. Well, I thought I’d watch him a while, so I put him in with the goldfish, figuring he was too small to harm the goldfish.
He was. I came in to feed the fish and discovered one of my stupid goldfish had swallowed the catfish headfirst, but (eww factor very strong in what follows here) could not get it all down, since they were close to the same size. Worse, the catfish was still alive, and had jammed its top spine through the upper lip of the goldfish.
Well, there was no way to disengage the goldfish, because that fin is directional. That goldfish swam around for days, slowly digesting this catfish, which demised after about the first day. It ate that catfish, bit by bit working it further down, thus proving you can eat something bigger than your head, but it was not a pretty sight.
I have had koi eat a gecko (not our plan) and otherwise demonstrate the capacity to act much the same.
So I don’t trust anything in with them.
It might be possible to cage algae eaters in mesh too small for the koi to penetrate. As long as the fish have a protected refuge they’d have a fighting chance.
Well, actually koi ARE algae eaters—and anything else they take a fancy to. Mostly algae and small crustaceans. And water hyacinth. We’ve been very happy that they’ve left our lilies alone.
I grew up with access to a freshwater lake, where I learned to swim. About August every year, the algae started taking over in great seething blooms, and I remember Dad paddling around in a canoe and flinging handfuls of copper sulfate crystals into the floating mats to try and kill it off before eutrophication set in. Once it started dying back, decaying algae made it too disgusting to swim.
Would ducks (assuming you could borrow a couple) find the koi tasty tidbits? As long as ducks were on the lake, algae was on their menu.
We used to have a couple of plecostomus in our 50 gallon library tank. They grew to be nearly a foot long, and resembled nothing so much as prehistoric armor plated fish. If you could find one or two that large, I think even your koi would have trouble fitting them down their gullets. I don’t know how they would winter over though; they might not be hardy enough.
Hi! Really I just want to see if my new gravatar is working, and if it replaces the old pics too or keeps both.
And, remembering a discussion earlier about old things versus new, I have been spending much of this month making home-made jam. Nectarine jam, that tastes like summer in a jar. Spiced nectarine (next time I will throw in more spice), amaretto peach (next time, I will have real amaretto on hand, and not just almond extract, but it’s still quite good). And today or tomorrow it will be grape jelly, with diamond muscat/red flame grape juice. All made the old-fashioned way… fruit, lemon juice, sugar, boiled until it’s jam-y, then put into jars and canned in a water bath. In my opinion, it tastes better than using added pectin. More people should try t… there’s something deeply satisfying about hearing the “ping” of the seals forming after you finish the canning.
Hmm… will it work this time?
It looks nice Philospher!
Thanks, but I’ve got a new pic of my Trink that I am trying to use, but it doesn’t seem to want to switch it over. Or maybe it just takes time to work its way through the net?
philospher, do you know Greg Brown’s “Canned Goods” – “taste a little of the summer, Grandma put it all in jars”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjdOB1AnCZ8
This is a relatively recent concert. My recording of the song is ten or more years old, and the diction is much better. It’s one of my favorites. Though my mother cavilled that canned tomatoes really don’t taste like the summer at all; they’re a whole different vegetable from fresh off the vine.
I pick our native Mustang Grapes for jelly. Inedible leathery-skinned acid things, but mmm-mmmm they make good jelly! Same with native Mexican Plums.
Would it be at all feasible to put in a reed-bed filtration system? It will provide a long term, low maintenance fix for your water quality problems. Your reed bed may not require a surface area more than 1/3 that of your pond (if the stuff I’m reading on the net is to be believed). In the short term AbigailM’s water hyacinth idea would be excellent, but then as she says above you’ll soon develop another sort of biomass problem.
On the fish-eating-fish thing: some years ago I landed a flounder which promptly disgorged a baby flathead. My fishing partner suggested that I use the half-digested fish as bait and so I did. Within two minutes I had a large flathead flapping around on the floor of the boat. Good eating there. 🙂
Last year when I was living in Flagstaff, I was caretaker for a 10,000 gallon koi pond. It had massive filtration, sand filter, constant water changes through two seperate strainers, and a waterfall for aeration. It was lovely, but in summer, I was hauling out about 50 pounds of algae each week, no exaggeration. The koi were too well fed to eat much of it (my fault, I loved hand feeding them), but even the good filtration was inadequate to deal with the summer growth. So I waded in and carried the stuff out by hand. Made GREAT compost! Also, as creepy and weird as this is going to sound to some people, I “recycle” much organic waste via vermiculture, or worms. I have a large bin of red wiggler worms that consume just about anything and churn out great fertilizer and potting soil for plants. They were never so happy as when I was feeding them this algae! CJ, maybe you should get a bin of red wigglers! Then you’ll not be so vexed by the algae, you’ll look forward to it as a harvest for your new “pets!” 🙂 Plus your friends who want to go fishing at the lake will pay you for red wigglers to use as bait. I get $4.99 for 24 worms! And they reproduce prodigiously! Just sayin’.
Lol! Not to mention how koi love worms!
Oh, yeah! Free fish food! Circle of life kind of thing! LOL
Wasn’t there an old ad that said something like “re.e.e.ed wigglers! the cadillac of worms.”
YEEESS! And they ARE the cadillac of worms! ROFL!
hmmmm
“When not controlled, water hyacinth will cover lakes and ponds entirely; this dramatically impacts water flow, blocks sunlight from reaching native aquatic plants, and starves the water of oxygen, often killing fish (or turtles). The plants also create a prime habitat for mosquitos, the classic vectors of disease, and a species of snail known to host a parasitic flatworm which causes schistosomiasis (snail fever).”
I won’t be putting that in my pond then! I would guess that it is banned in europe, if available at all!
I don’t know from what area your water hyacinth quote comes. They are quite woll controlled by cold winters — they would never become a problem in Spokane! And they are used as water *purifiers* in some water treatment systems, because the extensive feathery rood masses grab out massive amounts of nutrients from the water. They are a major pest in southern US waterways because they grow so fast and clog up the channels. THat’s why they can’t be shipped to Texas. Blocking sunlight is just what may be needed in this case, however, and in a small (relatively speaking) pond they are easily controlled, so that they don’t get so packed together as to be a problem. They are native in the Amazon, and a real problem in east Africa and the southern US. But also pretty, and useful if controlled. http://aquaplant.tamu.edu/database/floating_plants/water_hyacinth.htm
Use for sewage treatment: http://technology.ssc.nasa.gov/suc_stennis_water.html
Oddly, it seems to be used quite a bit as a fiber source for wicker furniture – google water hyacinth chair!
Ugh, didn’t proofread previous post, sorry!
Our floating sunshield can accommodate water plants: the roots grow through it. Koi, however, are root-nibblers, among their other omnivorous talents. They have not bothered our lilies much, except to clip every root that comes through the mesh/peat bundle that contains them. Next year, bigger bundles!
Our previous experience with water hyacinth was that four 8″ koi can demolish an entire plant in 2 days.
We’ll see next year how these little guys do.
This morning the pond is not significantly clearer, but biological action is up and going: little foam bits on the water.
it was a quote from wikepdia … I suspect though that if it has an invasive habit it wouldn’t be allowed in Europe. we already have various imported aquatic flora and fauna which are causing problems in our lakes and rivers.
sounds ideal for a koi pond in Spokane though!
Not to mention what caulerpa weed (from a research center’s own effluent) is doing to the Mediterranean. Toxic, invasive, and has 3 modes of reproduction: pieces, runners, and spores. I don’t blame Europe for being nervous.
We’re having all kinds of problems. Japanese knotweed and ragwort on dry land, various algae in lakes (it’s bad enough this year that a lot of places have toxidity warnings – there’s a lot of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) in my neck of the woods, and people and pets are warned away from water. Not that the British ever got the idea that you can swim in lakes. It seems to be a totally alien concept. Yes, there *are* times I miss living in Germany. Not many, and nowhere near enough to ever contemplate living there again, but I’d love an accessible lake for swimming in.
Hey, you! I never “opined” or even said any such thing! You’re fibbin’! I bet you just thought it, realized how silly it was, and blamed it on me!!!! Hrmph. That’s okay. You’re cute. 😀
And as you say, we can use the floater for the hyacinth. Glad to know my poor fingers didn’t suffer for nothing! (That fishing line is murder on fingers, and keeping it pulled tight as I “stitched” for 18 feet made for very sore finners! Thankfully, we had that goofy setup down in the basement so I could sit on the cushions rather than the floor. My behind was very grateful for that! And it was COOL down there!
How did I know what you were thinking if you didn’t say it? Ha? *Ha?*
It wasn’t Jane who suggested the (salt water) rabbitfish be introduced to the (fresh water) pond. It was *me*, lol!
*Makes note to self: blame Jane for everything. It works!*
Oops. Well, when you said it, you momentarily *looked* like Jane. 😆
Well, as long as I didn’t look like “a herd of sheep” I guess all’s well.
well, you could get a start of hyacinth in the spring, set a hardware-cloth ring in the pond and let it grow fish-free till it filled it, then remove the ring and see if the hyacinth growth rate or the koi ingestion rate prevailed.
I always grew my lilies in plastic tubs – solid sides. Eventually a rhizome would always strike out over the edge of the tub and root down in the gunge at the pool bottom. I only had little goldfish, not big koi, so they didn’t seem to eat the lilies.