This spring I put a 60 gallon fish pond in my back yard. It is a plastic molded pond, and I installed it in a tiered flower box setup I have in my back yard. It has 5 gold fish type fish in it. I also have a medium size pump with a fountain head on it.
So the pond is theoretically above ground.
Anyway, where I live (Kamloops, BC Canada), the winters can get quite cold. It startes getting to about 0 degrees celsius around mid to late October and I have seen us get a couple weeks of minus 30 degree weather in February.
What should I do with my fish? I was told I can leave them in the pond and they would be fine come spring. Is this true? I’m assuming the pond will freeze solid.
Should I leave the fish in the pond? I’m not too attached so if they croak it’s not the end of the world to me.
Please help!
MtM
If the ice freezes solid, they will die. If it just freezes a little, they will probably survive (all other factors being good).
If it’s only 60 gallons and it’s above ground, bring it inside, put it in the basement. Or get a rubbermaid storage bin and let them live in that during the winter. Be sure to feed them no more than once or twice a week, and try to put it in a spot with a nonfluctuating low temp. Invest in a sponge filter; they can be pretty cheap.
If you absolutlely can’t bring them in, get a pond heater to keep the pond from freezing. Shouldn’t heat it all the way to warm; just this side of freezing.
I had a client whose monster koi I had to move back and forth from his pond to a huge aquarium every spring and fall.
The fish are not going to make it through the winter if you let them stay in a pond that small in your part of the world.
An inch or two of ice for a month or two is okay, but you are well beyond those limits in your region. Get it heated, or get them out.
Or get a bigger, deeper pond.
Well I have a 20 gallon aquarium I can resurect to put them in I guess.
I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend!
MtM
Although the OP is answered I found out something last night that others may find interesting too. Mrs. H. is an expert with fish and ponds. She said an outdoor pond in the northern US must at least 3 feet deep for fish to survive winter. (I would believe BC would be the same, deeper for farther north.) Deeper is better. I wondered about food and starving over winter (no bugs or algae). This is the cool part. Smaller carp-like fish (e.g. goldfish, Koi) stop eating at temperatures lower than 40F (4C). Between 40 and 50F (10C) they need low protein diets. She didn’t have an answer why you can catch fish in winter and we thought it probably only applies to goldfish, carp and select species.
Friends who have outside ponds bring in their fish over winter and we will too when we get ours built.
If you have an above-the-ground pond in Canada it had better be a lot bigger than three foot deep for the fish to survive. A dug-in pond that size would probably do OK unless there was a lot of detritus on the bottom (fish feces, decaying plants, etc). While the pond is ice-covered there is little oxygen exchange with the air. Bacteria involved in the decay process use oxygen, as do the fish. Although these processes are slow at cold temperatures, they eventually add up, and if the pond stays frozen all winter, well, when it thaws you’ll have a stinky bit of dead fish to clean up. Even if there is under-the-ice photosynthesis going, those same algae USE oxygen during the nights, which are long in your part of the world.