I broke ice today off of the pier in one of my smaller ponds to release a 4 inch perch from one of my RAS tanks. I aclimated him first in a container by allowing it to cool down most of the day.)
He had made his way through the screen around the center drain. Most of my perch are too big to fit through the screen. I found the little rascal in the bottom of my clarifier tank when I pulled the gate valve to purge the center drain pipe of solids.
Call me a softy but considering the time and effort it took me to produce this little guy, and the fact that I think all life is precious, I had to release him into the pond. It took some effort to break the ice and it was pretty dark out there at 9:30 P.M.
There were four other small ones that other day but I forgot about them in the bucket outside and they froze solid.
If pigs could fly bacon would be harder to come by and there would be a lot of damaged trees.
