The drought dried up our pond that had been thriving for many years! We were only recently looking to get more plants for it like Water Hawthorns, but I guess the drought has put a stop to that plan. Our fish were raised from little guys from the pet store, like our koi who grew to be 16″.
So we realized that we had to save them and collected kiddie pools and an old bath tub, and set up emergency head quarters in Bill’s garage, so nothing wild would reach them, then we put on waders, set up rope lines across the pond to hold onto, while we walked in 2′ of muck, trying to collect our 8 fish and now all their off spring, because as the water got lower, it got warmer causing them to spawned. We now had over 100 fingerlings! Catching all of these was a fish rodeo, but we were successful in the end. Only there wasn’t much water depth in the pools and tubs we set up and winter was coming, I was worried about them freezing. So I set out a request on Facebook asking local folks if anyone had any spare aquariums kicking around as we had this emergency rescue, and folks came through! We got two 55 gal. aquariums and an 80 gal. one. Since then most have survived and many have already changed from green to many colors of gold and white.
The first tank which was the nursery with the tiniest fish, who now are growing.
The medium sized fish and two white mothers we’ve had for gosh, maybe 15 years or more. We realized that the different sizes of fingerlings meant different hatchings. See they came to say hi.
