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Need Fish Pond Help


Mainecoons

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I need to start over first and obviously could use some expert advice.  Is there anyone here who has had long term success with goldfish in a natural pond environment?

Once I get the problems solved, will need to restock.  I have a minnow trap that won't take large fish.  Would rather transplant from a natural environment where fish have largely lived on aquatic plants and algae.

I'd like to stick with common goldfish as these are normally the hardiest and easy to keep.  These fish lived for over a decade until this winter when they just started dying off.  The death rate appears to be total.

LCS seems to be very successful with their ponds.  Are there any LCS fish pond volunteers who might be willing to take a look at things and give some guidance?

Gracias!

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No, ponds are very sparsely populated.  Nice waterfall for aeration.  No signs of swimming at the top to get air.

Ponds are aerated and circulated 24 hours per day.

This is why I need help.  I've researched this to death and checked for everything I can find.  Algae is controlled.  Plants growing nicely, they like the ponds.  Anyone know the name of the fish expert at LCS?

 

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I have 17 fish up to 6 inches long in a six foot round three foot high pool.  I use a one foot long aerator bubbler and air pump at bottom of pond. I have only lost one fish in four years.  Also I change some of the water  with city water every week or so. We feed them floating goldfish/koi food from WalMart.   No filters, pond has some shade during the day from patio umbrella.  I would suggest changing the water over time as a start.  I have a funny feeling I am lucky.  Note my pond is deep.

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I'm going to need to do some restocking once I am convinced the ponds are healthy.  Where to buy common goldfish?  I don't want anything fancy or costly.  Fish from natural ponds are obviously the best as they would be the most acclimated.  I have a minnow trap.

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There are fish shops in some of the malls.  I think the last one I recall was in the Torres mall on Lazaro Cardenas. We bought goldfish from them for our fountain & they lived for about 5 years.

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2 hours ago, Floradude said:

Iscats mentioned their pond was deep.  This brings up another suggestion. If your pond is shallow is there any chance the water is too hot.  If so, shade plants might help.

Nope, both ponds have deep areas. Water temp actually still pretty chilly.  Both get a lot of shade in summer when it was hot.  Remember, these are the same ponds that sustained strong fish populations for 9 years.  Nothing around them has changed.  If anything they get a little more shade than they used to.

Went to vivero.  Not helpful and their stuff didn't look very good. 

Anyone have a goldfish pond that could use a little thinning?

Die off seems to have stopped but not enough fish left to regenerate.  Need some fresh stock.

We are thinking at this point it might be a water problem with chlorine or chloramine.  Having a test kit brought from U.S. to check this out.  Not going to restock until I can check all water parameters.

I may see if I can get some smaller goldfish from LCS as theirs are in a very similar environment to ours.

 

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It just sounds like some problem with the water, which could be several things. Maybe regularly changing a part of it would be helpful in the future.

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Actually I think changing the water may have caused the problem.  Tested the water and it has a lot of chlorine.  We didn't use to have any chlorine in our city water.

I have one pond stabilized and would like to start restocking.  If anyone has a surplus of pond fish they'd be willing to share a few with me, please let me know.  Can also buy some fish but I want to try and find some from ponds as they will be used to the environment.

Thanks.

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Jerry Smith donated many of the KOI in the LCS pond.   He had a pond for about 12 years or so.   He and his wife are volunteers at LCS.  He lives in Ajijic and most everyone knows of him.  Ask around, he has been here 20 yrs.  

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Goldfish (Kingyo) and Koi are very popular in Japan, and here are some tips which I have been told locally;

1) Change 1/3-1/2 water with new water without chlorine regularly, say once a month. This is to lower Nitrous acid and ammonia in the water. Check PH concentration too. Aeration is a must unless you have a big pond with constant inflow. Preferable water temp for the fish is between 20-28C.  Chlorine, Nitrite and ammonia are enemies of the fish.

2) Do not feed too much. Kingyo does not stop eating.

3) Put  Kingyo into salt water with 0.5% (5g/1Liter=kilo) for about a week. This kills parasite and/or bad bacteria of the fish. Be careful 0.7-0.9% salt water kills goldfish. Use natural salt only.  

Generally speaking goldfish is much more sensitive than Koi.

 

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If it was caused by excessive chlorine, thanks for the warning to the rest of us with ponds. I am aware that municipal chlorine facilities can sometimes malfunction. If a spike of chlorine occurred at the time any of us are topping up our ponds, it could be deadly to our fish. So from now on, I will check for chlorine in the water with my simple pool chlorine test kit before adding water. However, the reason I think this problem is rare, is that most people have a storage tank where household water goes first, and sits, normally giving the chlorine time to evaporate, which I understand takes 24-48 hours. Comments?  Maincoombs, what was your level of chlorine in the water? 

 

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On 2/7/2017 at 11:55 AM, Mainecoons said:

Actually I think changing the water may have caused the problem.  Tested the water and it has a lot of chlorine.  We didn't use to have any chlorine in our city water.

I have one pond stabilized and would like to start restocking.  If anyone has a surplus of pond fish they'd be willing to share a few with me, please let me know.  Can also buy some fish but I want to try and find some from ponds as they will be used to the environment.

Thanks.

Ahhh I have charcoal filter that removes the chlorine (full water filtration system with water softener).  I never smell chlorine after the filtration system but do smell it in the storage tanks before filtering.  Fish don't like Chlorine. They have drops to remove it from the water.  Chlorine in water isn't in it all the time but has been lately in the city water.  In my big underground tank( no filters, direct from city)   the chlorine just goes away but it is 3k gallons with time to expose the air before I use it to change the water. If I smell chlorine from big underground  tank I just don't use the water at that time and use filtered water.   I do admit that there is a little luck to this but I grew up with hundreds of tropical fish so I may know more than I remember.  

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7 hours ago, Garth said:

If it was caused by excessive chlorine, thanks for the warning to the rest of us with ponds. I am aware that municipal chlorine facilities can sometimes malfunction. If a spike of chlorine occurred at the time any of us are topping up our ponds, it could be deadly to our fish. So from now on, I will check for chlorine in the water with my simple pool chlorine test kit before adding water. However, the reason I think this problem is rare, is that most people have a storage tank where household water goes first, and sits, normally giving the chlorine time to evaporate, which I understand takes 24-48 hours. Comments?  Maincoombs, what was your level of chlorine in the water? 

 

Store water and bubble air into it will remove the Chlorine faster than the water just sitting. 

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NOB many municipal water suppliers use chloramine, not chlorine. Don't know what they use here, but chloramine is more stable and isn't removed as easily as chlorine using time and aeration. For chlormaine removal, activated carbon filtration works well, also chemical neutralization. But unless you know they use chlorine and not chloramine here I wouldn't rely on aeration.

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7 hours ago, Garth said:

If it was caused by excessive chlorine, thanks for the warning to the rest of us with ponds. I am aware that municipal chlorine facilities can sometimes malfunction. If a spike of chlorine occurred at the time any of us are topping up our ponds, it could be deadly to our fish. So from now on, I will check for chlorine in the water with my simple pool chlorine test kit before adding water. However, the reason I think this problem is rare, is that most people have a storage tank where household water goes first, and sits, normally giving the chlorine time to evaporate, which I understand takes 24-48 hours. Comments?  Maincoombs, what was your level of chlorine in the water? 

 

 

It would have to had to be a spike because all my chlorine tests subsequent have come up blank.  And it does run through my very large aljibe first.

I don't think this was the problem either but I'm at a loss as to the cause.  As of now, both ponds have two survivors each.

 

 

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Have you checked ammonia and nitrite level of the water?
Chrorine usually dissapers in days. I wrote chrorine is an enemy to the fish. 
But correctly saying  chroline does not kill goldfish directly.
It kills aerobes in the water.

There are two kind of bacteria in the water;  aerobes and anaerobes.
Aerobes keep water suitable for the fish dissolving ammonia and nitrite which are fathal to the fish.
Main purpose of aeration housed in the goldfish breeders in Japan is to keep healthy level of aerobes.

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