Pond gold: fish!

Yesterday I talked about all of the hornwort that is growing in my pond, and how I used rocks to sink these oxygenators deep into the water. There's a reason that was important:

The pond got its new inhabitants: goldfish!

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I've been waiting for months for the tadpoles to move out, in case there were some delicious frog tadpoles mixed in with the icky toad ones. (That's according to fish. I'm pretty sure I've never tasted a tadpole, and almost definite I never will.)

So I went to the local Petsmart and picked out 15 of the expensive "large" goldfish.

They're expensive only when compared to the small (tiny!) goldfish, which were 13 cents each. The "large" ones were more than twice the price, at 27 cents. I gritted my teeth and paid the $4 total price for the bunch, and brought home a baggie of mixed colors.

They then spent 10 minute or so floating in the pond to let the temperature of the water in the bag match that of the pond -- don't want to send the new inhabitants into shock!

I then carefully released them, and they immediately disappeared. Completely invisible.

I saw a couple of the orange ones once or twice, but they all pretty much just hid. I've read that new fish do this though, and they should become less shy after a few days.

Using the rule of thumb that you need 20 gallons of water for each fish, this pond should easily support 40 fish, as the pond's capacity is at least 800 gallons. So why only 15?

First, I didn't want to add too many fish at once. Too much fish, um, "activity" at once could upset the balance and I could get a terrific algae bloom. More importantly though, I'm hoping these fish will someday start breeding (maybe this year?) and will increase the population without my assistance.

We'll see though.

For now, I'm just glad to get these into the water to give me another reason to just stand out by the pond and gaze into the somewhat murky depths.

Maybe I'll even see an occasional flash of orange out there.

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