Went by a pond other day and wow! Must have been a hundred dead fish all shapes and sizes. Has anyone else seen this?
Ice finally went off my pond this week. Found all bass and bluegills dead and floating. Only the goldfish survived. Thick ice and heavy snow covered pond from mid December until April -- no sunlight penetration so no plants producing oxygen. Will have to restock
Was it a small pond? What I mean,did the ice freeze to the bottom?
It is not just the fish this year. In the Finger Lakes they are saying that most of the grape vines were severely damaged and federal money is needed to help the farmers and wineries survive.
cfarm - the pond is about 50' x 100' and 12' deep at the north end when it is at the over flow pipe. With the lack of rain last summer the pond was down 2-3 feet at freeze up. I don't think it froze solid but it must have been quite thick plus had a lot of drifted snow on top. There was no flow through the pond all winter. It filled up st snow melt and rain in the past two weeks but it was too late for the fish
I just uncovered Tammy's koi pond. I see only two dead so far of the 22 that were in there. I feared they would all be dead after this winter. The two that died were not actually Koi fish, but Comets.
I set up an air pump on a timer for the winter months. Have not lost a fish over the winter for quite a few years.
The fish likely died from oxygen deficiency, OD. It's not so much the thickness of the ice but the snow cover which doesn't allow for adequate sunlight to reach the water therefor depleting the water of oxygen causing the fish to suffocate.
In our neighborhood, the big casualty this year seems to be the Alberta Spruce. It is a very popular ornamental in this area. We have one, our various neighbors have many. The extremely low extended temps seem to have effected almost all of them. I don't know if they will come back or not, but they are mostly all brown with the needles falling off.
I read the other day that 1000's of ducks and geese died as a result of the ice. It was a bad winter.
Little smaller scale but my FIL put their two goldfish in the horse tank for the winter and just after the first really cold snap the tank heater quit working and the tank didn't have a lot of water in it so it pretty well froze. He said one of them was froze solid but he fixed the heater, filled the tank and threw it back in, next morning it was swimming around with the other one ???. Wish I could be that resiliant. Haven't heard anything about any lakes around here, but nobody was having much luck ice fishing this winter.
Edit: We did not have the snow here though, just cold.
I think I felt like that gold fish a couple of times this winter :D. Hopefully some of the ticks and bugs that are killing the tree have the same fate as the fish!
I am still feeling like the frozen fish, snowed yesterday and the sideroads were like rinks. Customer came up to his cottage to have me do a repair and he was in shoes. He lives two and a half hours south of here and there is almost no snow in his town. It is still almost to his knees at his cottage and this is a year after his daughter swam on April 1st in an ice free lake. Quite a change from one year to the next.
Last spring when I took the cover off the BBQ grill, there were a million stink bugs under it. This spring, there isn't one single stink bug, Those minus twenty days must have done them in!
One winter kill to celebrate! 8)