as far as the never ending speculation about how fish get in empty bodies of water I still can't understand why we just keep passing on the old assumptions and theories when they don't make much sense. I guess each can have their own favorite theory, but this forum has members gifted in biology, in research, in mathematics, and in the standard scientific method or hypotheses, experimentation and conclusion.
It is crazy that we still just say that eggs stick to raccoon legs or bird feathers and figure we must have hit a home run on solving that question.
We should be way beyond just speculation with our current ability to set up and control experiments and separate the speculation cause from the real cause. Cameras are cheap and can be setup with convenient cell phone connections.
It seems like 10 people could set up 10 small depressions in the ground (or 5 people could set up 2 each) and be sure the only source of water able to get into the depression would be from the sky. Assuming a newly created dug out area with no water and no fish. Add chlorinated water if one wanted to be sure there wasn't any fish eggs in the tap water (now that is an interesting concept not mentioned in the articles above). Then set up a camera to monitor 24x7.
If no stork, duck or other bird lands in the water then you have proven the concept. If no raccoon takes a drink or possum or other animal then we can't blame then. If no water comes over land in a runoff event then that takes care of that idea. If a month or two goes by and suddenly there are fish in there then we have to go back to hypothesizing how fish get in there. If several months go by and no fish show up then we can say that not all ponds will self-stock themselves with fish like is commonly put forth.
It is in a way nice to know that somehow fish will find their way into any new body of water and I as much as anyone am curious about how, but to say eggs are sticky, and they jump on to animal legs, and they survive the hike or the flight over to the next pond and then they jump off as soon as they feel they are in their new home, and then they go back to a nest in the new pond and finish hatching... I just don't know.
But again, that is more just for discussion and not to say that I have the answers. I just feel we can use the same scientific method to set up some simple scenarios to shed light on the question.
What if we found out that there was really a modern day Johnny Appleseed who went around secretly stocking fish for us? Or that those big white trails or smoke we see across the sky (read online about the jet plane contrail controversy) are simply the government ejecting water streams and are stocking millions of fish which happen to land in every available puddle to spawn?
All in good fun of course. It is heartening for me to know that we don't know everything and there still is a mystery for us to marvel at even with all our advanced science and technology.
