De freeze of garden pond

wendgro

Managed to get my DEAD goldfish out of the pond now it's defrozen lo and behold I also fished out 15 dead quite large frogs yuk we always have frog spawn in the spring but only ever thought we had one or two frogs

bertyboy

still got a fair bit of ice on mine but can see the fish moving about beneath , we did make sure we kept an air hole clear for the gasses to escape x

tweedie

Hiya,
Our pond was frozen in the ' big' freeze , we had 2 fish frozen in the ice , one a large ish shebunkin very dead , but the other a common goldfish was still frozen in the thick ice , next day the ice was a bit thinner so OH went to remove 'body ' so as not to contanimate the pond, he broke off some of the ice from around dead body -- then the fish moved !! and was put back into pond where it slowly swam down into the depths !!! where it is seen slowly swimming around with various friends , with all the snow and the length of time the pond was compleatly frozen we thought that the ponds inhabitants would all be dead , but isn't nature wonderful :eek: , against all odds , things CAN survive . :eek:

mellman01

We just leave ours to do it's thing, don't have fish other than stickle backs frogs and newts, fish just destroy all the plants, so how deep are your ponds??, do you use the pump all the time even in really cold weather??????.

tjt6768

I heard that the trick is to put a tennis ball in the water or summat....?
Not that I have a pond or owt, lol...

dreamdaisy

Perhaps that was a fishy version of hibernation. DD

mellman01

Don't be daft Tony, as far as I know fish don't play tennis!.

mellman01

see that's where I have beaten the problem I got shot of all me carp I think we only have stickle backs if there is any fish still in it, it does it's own thing does our pond, that reminds me I do need to de smeg it from all the poo that fell into it in the autum, do I do that in the spring before the frogs and newts start humping or what???

tjt6768

sorry mel, I should have realised, it's the frogs that make all the RACKET! Lol

mellman01 wrote:

Don't be daft Tony, as far as I know fish don't play tennis!.

wendgro

The goldfish he and she did breed in the summer anf we had small fish in the pond haven't come across any of those dead the pond is about 2ft deep but who would think temps would go down to 14 c [color=#400[/color]roll on spring

frogmorton

Oh wendy

I bet you were upset :sad:

glad I haven't got a pond....would be a bit cruel really as daisycat would sit there catching them and they would be trapped :shock:

I loved the tennis playing water-creatures though

grampyal

What a fool' in cold spell I spent ages on-line looking for answers to frozen pond when all I had to do was go to Arthritis Care. Did find www.fishkeeping.co.uk very helpfull. Our pond had about 4ins of ice on it and some fish, mostly the bigger ones were either in the ice or just under it othres were swimming about under the ice. The advice from the above websit was that gasses can be trapped under the ice which can kill the fish, hence the hole in the ice. Hot water is slow so I finally used an electric paint stripper ( being careful not to get it in the water) then put polystyrene sheet over the hole which did stop it refreezing. When the ice melted I took out about 20 dead fish although a couple that seemed dead did twitch when I put them in the bucket so were returned and swam away. In cold conditions fish will become torpid must be like hibernation but if gas from rotting vegetation is trapped it will kill them. Will have to organise waterfall for next year. About 60 did survive.