Background. 2 acre pond aerated dug in 1979. Always been fertilized regularly. Have automatic feeder, feeding aquamax mvp. Pond has 7 springs with water always flowing out. We had large amounts of rain a few weeks ago, about 6 inches in a couple of hours. About a week after the rain is when the aquatic plants showed up on top of water. I have not fertilized since.
I am seeing duck weed & watermeal for sure and possibly some sort of Net Algae in the first photo. The small specks are likely watermeal, the slightly larger single, double, triple leaved plants would be duck weed while the fibrous stuff looks to be the net algae. I'm not real sure about the net algae. Mine is very, very net like when free floating in the pond. It's hard to tell all matted up. There is also some of the typical slimy FA in there too.
EDIT: If you can cut the top off a smooth clear plastic bottle and fill it with clear tap water and put a small sample of the fibrous stringy stuff in, it would allow it to spread out and show itself a little better for a photo.
I have been doing research and that's what I was thinking it was, just wanted to confirm. The other thing I've been trying to learn and haven't really found anything. I'm thinking all this is result of nutrient overload from the flooding. What's the odds of this stuff going away and not returning? I've never had a problem with any of this until after the large amount of rain and I'm downstream from a cow pond. I haven't done any treatments but have been monitoring it closely. It does not appear to be spreading. My hopes and might be a long shot is that as the nutrient level depletes from overflow, that the pond will return back to normal. Is that just wishful thinking with this stuff or is it possible?
My novice thoughts would be that IF the cow pond significantly over flowed a bunch of nutrient laden water that was trapped in your pond AND it is a rare occurrence AND your pond is not normally nutrient heavy that the veggie outbreak could diminish once the water loses its nutrients due to the current plant load.
Very good point, I guess I was thinking that the pond would still overflow through the pipe on regular occasion to carry the nutrients away , but if that would not be the case the nutrients would be trapped.
Yeah. I'm hoping that we get enough rain from hurricane Harvey (but not to much) that all the plants will run out of the overflow. If not, I will start manually remove them.
That's why I said I hope not to much rain. When I got this nutrient dump this time it was from a very large amount of rain. I have never seen that much rain in such a short period when this occurred. So my hopes are that this was just a rare occasion, since this problem didn't start until after the flood.