They Crazy Koi & Sarassah Fish!

The Crazy Fish!
If you remember, a while back I made a post about putting a few Koi in our pond. Zippy and I both assumed the snapping turtles had to have eaten the 4 Sarassah and 2 Koi fish we put in our pond. We have a pretty big pond but since we didn’t see them again after putting them in there we figured they were gone for sure. Boy were we wrong. The pond, still covered in algea, has spawned TONS of those little white and gold fish. The water line is going back down to normal so we can see into the deeper parts of the pond where there are now schools of small to medium sized white and gold fish. Sometime between April 15th & now the Sarassah or Koi multiplied. It’s exciting to see so much colorful life in the pond.

I’m willing to bet the Grass Carp I put in there a while back to clean up the algae are still alive as well. I’m not sure if the Koi & Sarassah like the fact the pond is covered in algae or not. I’ve had an aerating pump in the middle of the pond for a while so they are getting a little bit of fresh air and since they are multiplying I can only assume their situation must be acceptable. Now that we know they are in there we are going to start feeding them regularly in one spot to draw them in for pictures & viewing. I’m glad we just dropped them in the water months ago. Now I’m excited to find out how they fare the winter. If this trend continues our pond will be full of big colorful fish to see. Even as things stand right now, if you live relatively near to us and want some white and gold fish in your pond it would seem we can help cater to that. I’m sure they must work out their own population control but at this rate we’ll have no problem helping others populate their ponds. Zippy and I must have stood in awe at least an hour after noticing all those bright fish swimming around in the pond. I’m still amazed.

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I’ll repeat what I just said for clarity sake just in case anyone else out there is interested in the information. We have a medium sized natural pond on our property. When taken in the context of a Koi some would call what we have a Mud Pond. Earlier this year we spent $70 to put 6 brightly colored fish in it. 2 of them were Koi and 4 were Sarassah which look a lot like Koi but are a bit smaller. I also built and installed small pond pump / aerator.

Here I am on our golf cart in front of our algae covered pond so you can get an idea of the size.

We put the fish in the pond in early April when it was clear of algae. Not long after that the algae grew faster then I could clean it so I just gave up on it and put two grass carp in the pond and let it be. Since then the rain has brought the pond water level up so high it spilled over into our yard and then receded back down due to evaporation from the high heat we’ve had the last few days. Everything except the aerating pump we put in was left completely natural. We didn’t even feed any of the fish we put in the pond, we didn’t do anything other than put the fish & an aerator in there and then 3 - 4 months later we now see schools of what are probably Sarassah fish swimming around near the shallower sections of the pond. All the fish we saw looked very bright, healthy and fast. They seem to really get a long well in the natural pond.

The pond is naturally heavily inhabited by a lot of painted, box & snapping turtles as well ass thousands of frogs and toads. In mid to late spring you couldn’t look at the pond without seeing hundreds of tad poles.