Zephyr pond is shrinking fast. I have ordered and plan to install and aeration system in the next couple of weeks. My question is can a pond sustain more biomass with an aeration system than without or does biomass even enter into the areation equations? I still have some larger CC and should I be making plans to get them out ASAP. I don't see many of the BG's I had put in earlier. I still see the Tilapia and the grass carp. LMB are getting really hard to catch. HELP!!!
In a part of my industry, we use air injection to stimulate subsurface bacterial growth used to degrade (usu.) petroleum hydrocarbons in both soil and groundwater. I imagine a similar dynamic would apply to pond (i.e. increasing aerobic bacteria and degradation rates of dead biomass plus increased oxygen and expanding living biomass), but I dont really know......a great question for the aeration experts.......
Remember the most crucial part to keeping fish alive is not letting them go 15 minutes without sufficient O2 in the water. Aeration directly addresses that.
Removing fish will help cut the O2 demand as Zephyr shrinks. Removing larger fish is doubly helpful - larger fish usually suffer from low O2 before smaller fish (of the same species), and larger fish have a greater Biological Oxygen Demand than smaller fish (both direct - what they use through their gills, and indirect - from decomposing their waste products).