LL :

Sorry if my prior post raised undue concern. I had a suspicion that might happen . Please don't be overly concerned as Greg noted. More pics. may well help. Do all of the dead fish look like the posted pic. ? If not then I would not worry about the one fish, just keep watching and if you see more that look just like it then post again.

As Theo noted there can be many reasons why a fish might look funny. Stunted growth , cross breeding , genetics, in some cases toxicity or disease , injury and others.

For example BG produce thousands of offspring at a time. Out of all of them there may well be a few whos genes just do not match up correctly and it is deformed. When this happens the fish ,if it lives at all ,is most times weak and can't compete and dies and you never see it or know about it. That set of genes is then gone from the pond and are not reproduced in offspring. That is normal and it would not worry me one bit. If a large % of your fish that size look strange then it may be time to look for reasons.

But even that is not a matter to worry about. On a small pond it is fairly easy to start over or add the right combination of fish or mgt. methods to fix most problems . That is what this forum is all about ,helping each other with our ponds. The same type of normal pond occurences ( with no worry} can apply to the other reasons stated above.

My prior comments were observations about one dead fish from a pic. and did not apply to your pond status. As I noted they were way out on a limb and as Theo noted were speculation as to why. I did not say nor do I think that you have or are growing monsters in your pond. We will try to help if you give us the facts and keep us updated. Good luck and don't worry. ewest