The pond owner will get fishy smelling and sometimes fishy tasting water WITHOUT fish. Try it to verify my correctness or it can be verified with any good college professor familar with algae. Try contacting IL Natural History Survey, someone there should be able to verify this info. I want to hear how the pond owner expains fishy water without fish. It may take several years for the offending algae to get established but it almost always does. There could likely be other tastes/odors that develop besides fishy from algae.
Although fishy odor types of algae do often get transferred into BOW from fish hatchery water, water fowl and often wind blown algal spores. Fishy odors and smells in water come from algae not fish. Metabolite by-products from different species of algae produce all sorts of odors and flavors in addition to fishy. Not all algae produce strong odors just several types do. A pond will not get a fishy odor from fish unless there are a lot of dead fish.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 03/28/10 08:50 PM.
