Dr. Luke,
I'm feeling that pain pretty clearly over here. I was told that my pond also could hit its carrying capacity and do the same. I don't know what else to do. My kids want to skate and so at this point I'm not going to do shallow water aeration. This winter we had less time with snow cover and I was able to keep it cleared for skating. But I have ZERO plants so keeping it clear didn't really create any oxygen for me if you have zero plants right?? On top of it my groundwater table must have really dropped as the water levels seem to be done about 3'.
My questions for you to think about:
Can you check water for something besides low O2 that could have killed (meaning some inflow of some chemical or toxin for example?) That might be good to know before restocking
Did your water level drop a lot that set up concentration of the fish in smaller water meaning less resources or oxygen to go around?
For sure you need to sample your fish to see if it hit a TYPE of fish or a SIZE CLASS strongly. That might give some idea of the reason behind this
Obviously you can't measure oxygen levels after ice out as they won't correlate.
From your description it didn't seem like a bad winter or a situation where your ice and snow started at Thanksgiving and persisted till now so would it really be a sunlight issue?
One of my goal for this year is to try to find a more reliable way to harvest my spotfins and find a way to ship them. You are on the top of my list to offer some stocker SFS if you can't find them yourself in local BOW and are interested. It would make the most sense to stock them if you were going to spend this season building forage first. If you stock predators first it might be harder for a few stocker size SFS to survive.
Thanks for sharing your pain and we all can live through this with you.
Last edited by canyoncreek; 03/09/21 01:19 PM.
