Thursday, January 19, 2006

Fish worries


This weather has me worrying about my pond fish. We've been so disorganized this year that we still haven't gotten the bubbler rigged up to keep the pond from freezing over. So the warm temps are a good thing in that regard, but I worry that the warmish temps are stressing them.

I hardly feed my fish during the warm months, but stop altogether from around Halloween until April Fool's Day. With colder temps the fish don't eat and can't properly metabolize the food anyway, so feeding is dangerous. During a *normal* winter they just hang out down at the bottom of the pond and live-in-limbo under the ice until the world warms again. This year, however, they are pretty active and are even begging when they see me at pondside on warmish days. The warming days of spring seem to be when I'm most likely to loose a fish to disease. They are weak after the winter and are prone to bacterial attack at this time. So I'm hoping for colder weather and ice, and a bubbler.

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