Joey,
Thanks for your respectful disagreement.
I'll take my 40 years of making a living providing results over anything empirical, anything replicated in a bucket or aquarium. Empirical science, especially this stuff, doesn't account for all the variables, especially in a pond. There's way more biology going on in this case than simply the nitrogen cycle. Plus, the nitrogen cycle rate depends on other variables, substrate, bacterial colonies, periphyton, vegetation or lack of vegetation, other metals and minerals dissolved in the water, temperatures, fluctuation of temperatures, rain, runoff, point-source.
I appreciate your scientific contribution to this thread. The bottom line is no one has figured out the problem here, so no one can offer a solution.
Time will tell here. Having handled literally millions of fish and stocking hundreds of ponds and lakes, monitoring many of those lakes for years, my gut says something was wrong with those fish when stocked. I'll stick with that.
By the way, there's nothing "intensive" about this case. Very low biomass compared to volume of water.
Thought I'd add a little bit more to educate those reading this thread. Even if we could make the argument that the pond water has/had toxic levels of ammonia, the level of ammonia (wherever it is in the denitrification process) won't be the same throughout the pond. It won't be the same for several reasons. Ammonia ions don't weigh the same as water molecules. Levels won't be the same on the bottom of the pond as on the surface. It won't be the same six inches from a rock as it will be next to the mud. It won't be the same where mixing from wave action is occurring. While we can replicate the science in a bucket, a pond isn't a bucket. There has to be a source of the ammonia and it has to be accelerated beyond the exponential growth of denitrifying bacteria. Even 50 pounds of bluegill in a pond that size won't be a significant source. As dynamic as the nitrogen cycle is, it won't be the same on Day 1 as it is on Day 6, or on Day 7 or Day 135.5.
Believe me, I'm not disputing the science. I'm saying the odds of ammonia being the "problem" in this case could have only occurred as a result of the way the fish were handled between the hatchery and the pond where they were stocked. If the fish died due to ammonia issues, it happened during transport.
Finally, if ammonia were truly the issue in this case, there are hundreds of thousands (literally) of other ponds that should fall victim. They don't.
Last edited by Bob Lusk; 06/23/19 07:07 PM.
