Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Fish Kill in West Central Indiana

I have an 18-feet-deep pond in west central Indiana. The ice is just now starting to really thaw. Just noticed around 630 tonight that I have a lot of floaters. Then noticed lots are still stuck in the ice. Anyone else have this? Quite sad. Four years of growth down the tubes.

That's why having a good aeration system in the pond is critical. A client had a winterkill in one of his ponds with a windmill aerator (2 weeks of cloundy, foggy, overcast days) while his other ponds that had electric compressor aeration systems did fine.

With this hard winter that we had, I suspect that there will be a LOT of pond owners in the same boat.

FWIW I still have 14" of ice on my pond, and the top 10"-11" of it looks like milk.

Yea - I feel like I have had a death in the family. I will definitely look into aeration now. I have geothermal loops in my pond for my HVAC system though so not sure if I can have aeration. My pond is about three acres so I am hoping I could get the aerator far enough away from my loops that it wouldn't interfere. idk though...

Same here in East Central Indiana. I've been the boss of my pond for 8 years and this is the first kill ever. Many years my 2 1/2 acre pond has not frozen over all season. This year it was frozen solid for a good three months. Because of frequent partial thaws followed by extreme cold refreezing, the ice was very opaque.

Bass seemed to be most affected. I had cleared out most of the large flathead cats but for 2 or 3 very large ones in the 8 to 10 lb range. Two of them were belly up. Only a couple of bluegills. Although there were some 3 in bluegills it seems the largest fish took the brunt. My question is whether the big floaters were just the tip of the iceberg, and that many more died, but sunk to the bottom. This stinks! Literally.

The sad part is I have a good aeration system but only use it when water temperature is above 50. Should I be running it year round?

I run mine 24/7/365. O2 gets into ponds via photosynthesis from plants or phytoplankton, and via interaction with air. Cut off the sunlight with thick opaque ice, and the O2 bank will be slowly depleted. Running a diffuser during the winter allows the water to come in contact with the air, and also allows sunlight to penetrate the water. The deeper the pond, the more O2 is in the bank, but over long periods of ice cover, the bank gets depleted.

I run my diffuser in an area of the pond where it will thaw the ice all the way to the shore, so that if something goes into the water, it can get back out. I have the diffuser set about 1/4 the total pond depth. Look for an article in Pond Boss Magazine the Fall of 2014 on winter aeration.

My neighbor has very similar pond to mine. Same depth and size also with no aeration - he says his is fine. Weird. I did drop two large trees onto the ice - about 20 inches in diameter - (They were like three feet below the water line and dead, so just used the ice as a way to easily cut them down) . I wonder if the vibration from the trees hitting the ice did any killing? Probably a stupid question, but it was probably quite a shock to the fish when the trees smacked the ice.

My neighbor thinks he didn't have any die because he did some ice fishing...I doubt that was a factor?

The trees shouldn't have done anything other than maybe scare a few fish.

It all depends on the BOD (Biochemical Oxygen Demand) of the things in the pond. Large fish need more O2 than smaller ones. If there were a lot of underwater weeds in your pond, when they decompose during the winter, they need O2. Ponds with mucky bottoms need more O2 than clean bottom ponds, etc., etc.

I had a lot of weeds and leaves in my pond too; I bet that sucked up a lot of oxygen

We were predicting fish winterkills back in early February due to heavy extended snow cover on northern ponds.
http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=28519&Number=365230#Post365230

Dissolved oxygen dropped to 2 mg/L (ppm) in my pond back in mid January and I started aerating several hours a day about 3 to 4 hrs and kept the DO high enough so fish survived (2-4ppm). In comparison I measured DO in a 20ac reservoir with 12" of clear ice on Mar 11. Wind had kept snow mostly blown off the ice. DO on this 8ft deep reservoir was 9.5 top to bottom. Clear ice with little snow cover makes a big difference in the amount of DO under the ice.

Discussing winter aeration:
http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=28010&Number=365379#Post365379

Water testing under the ice.
http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=28520&Number=365466#Post365466

So sorry to hear of your losses gentlemen. That's awful. I would be sick! A diffuser in the water near the bank would have saved your fish. Sorry you had to learn the hard way. This winter was brutal!

My pond had up to 2 feet of snow and 18 inches of ice. I had no trouble catching fish today with three of these in about 20 minutes.

Ice is down to 11 1/2 inches with the top two inches slush. I wasn't worried about low D.O. but did cool the pond down several degrees which had me concerned.

We will have dead fish too, but most of the pond is still ice covered, so I can not tell how bad it will be. I am not hopeful.

Nice fish Cecil!

Let's hope for a pleasant surprise!

Thanks. Hopefully a bunch of 14 inchers or larger this year to make some money to invest in a pole building!

I am just hoping the new pond fared better. I am pretty confident that the LMB, RES, BG, and CC in the old pond has some survivors of each species. I am more worried about the large YP we had stocked in the new pond last fall. My hope is that with little plant material in the new pond, the O2 stayed high enough to bring them through. I am planning aeration for the old pond, but he new one is too far from electric. My hold up on aeration in the old pond is digging the trench from the barn to the pond.

I took 488 dead fish out today, which is far less than I had feared. Not bad for a 3 acre pond. Even if there is another 500 hidden under the ice, which I doubt, I should be fine. I stocked it with 1000 BG and 200 LMB 4 years ago right after the damn was done, and they have been thriving since then. Anyone have a guesstimate of how many fish I have? I have no idea really. I'd think a few thousand. I've only taken probably around 100 to 200 fish out of it till this fish kill. Still planning on getting an aerator though. It was sad to see.

I thought I read on here that most of the fish killed never float up. So that means you may have many many times more than 500 dead on the bottom...

The insidious thing about these fish kills is the biggest fish go first.

The best thing to do is get a population survey done to determine what species and size of fish were affected the most. That way you can bring the pond back up to speed with the correct restocking of fish.

Like Cecil said, the largest ones are the ones most likely to go first, and a lot don't float up. Just going by a gut feeling and from what I've observed in other ponds, but you might not even see 50% of the dead fish.

The ice has melted back just a few feet but two days ago when the sun was bright I counted 40 dead bull frogs laying on the bottom just around my deck and about another dozen along one side of the pond. Dozens of tadpoles and a couple of dozen mostly small bluegills are floating also. I did see one live tadpole so I have hopes that some Golden Shiners and Fatheads may be alive. It's just too expensive to run electric wire 700 feet to my pond. I was thinking maybe a heavy steel ball extended over the pond or concrete to crank up in the air and drop it everyday through the ice to keep an opening might be something to try. Maybe a small open hole for the fish to come to might help.

John, instead of running the electric, why not run the air 700' instead?

Sorry to hear this....

I am not sure if different types of fish are effect by this shock but I have seen this before too. My buddy came back from his trip to Costa-rica and noticed his koi pond frozen over. He panicked and pounded a hole in the ice with a hammer. In the spring every fish even all the small baby's were all dead. Was this from low OD for the week he was gone or from the shock?

Don.

I'm skeptical the shock would do anything.

Agree with CB1, not shock but it was low dissolved oxygen combined with toxic hydrogen sulfide that develops when DO is absent. The two together are quick death.