An elderly neighbour of mine...yes, elderly-er than me...recently had a severe downturn in his health and has been forced to admit that he will no longer be capable of maintaining his pond. He has a lovely in-ground pond equipped with a DIY garbage-can filter that he and I put together ourselves a number of years ago. His pond is, like mine, heavily overgrown with numerous rooted and floating plants, necessitating at least a couple of purges each season to thin them out. It's an irregular oval shape about 50 x 30 feet, with a centre depth of maybe 5 feet. Unlike mine, it doesn't freeze solid all the way to the bottom, and numerous fish survive quite handily under 3 or 4 feet of ice each winter. Numerous others don't.
It's been stocked with...well, just about everything he can lay his hands on. It contained way too many Goldfish (many of which he got from me), along with numerous Fathead Minnows, a couple of Koi, a few assorted others that he picked up on a whim in local stores or baitshops or from other casual aquarist/pondkeepers. He and his wife are not by any means serious hobbyists; they just like a casual rural lifestyle, and enjoy sitting on the little "dock" I helped him build next to the pond.
So when his wife called and told me about his health downturn and asked me if I would consider coming over and removing/re-homing the fish, I wasn't really looking forward to it, but I also couldn't say no. When I showed up a couple days ago...they're definitely "neighbours" IMHO but they still live about 30 kilometers away...I had with me all the gear of a well-armed collecting expedition. I arrived the day after Ivan got home from the hospital, and it was pretty obvious that the "we" in this project actually meant "me".
After removing 90% of the vegetation, I made a couple of cast-net throws, and they produced lots of fish, mostly Goldies. Then it was time to make a couple of passes with a seine net I had brought, which produced lots more. I won't list all the species present, since many of them were of "questionable" legality. I had already explained to my friends that the re-homing would be done almost entirely into my freezer, with a few choice specimens going into an indoor 75-gallon tank in their rec room. These are country folk; they have livestock and are very pragmatic in terms of life and death "on the farm".
So after a few hours of pleasant labour, interspersed with a few dock-sitting spells of beer drinking, Ivan and I each have 100 or so nice big Goldfish frozen for use as fishing bait this season, and likely well into next winter (as expected). He and his wife have 3 particularly attractive Goldies in their rec-room tank (also as expected).
And I brought home a rescue fish. I had no intentions of doing so, but I also didn't expect to find a couple of Chinese High-fin Suckers (Myxocyprinus asiaticus) in the pond either. Ivan tells me his son purchased 4 of them in town only a few weeks ago and believed they would do well in the pond. Ivan performed what my wife calls a "Ukrainian acclimation", which consists of cutting open the bag and dumping the fish into the pond, then opening a beer.
We found only two (one went into Ivan's basement tank), although I'm sure that we missed a number of assorted fish during our search-and-destroy mission in the pond. I'm going back in a couple days and we plan on pumping the pond almost dry, catching whatever stragglers we missed the first time, and then re-filling the pond and returning a bunch of plants. I'm kinda hoping we don't find more of the suckers then; as interesting as I find this species, it's just too big as an adult for my accommodations. I'm not sure what I will do with the one I have, assuming that it survives.
Currently in a mature 120-gallon tank that housed my Gymno's during the winter; they're outside now so this will be a quarantine for the Sucker. I dumped in a fair quantity of "pond mulm", i.e. fish crap, which I brought home with the fish, and offered it frozen brine shrimp and bloodworms. Its tummy profile and its sudden activity when food is introduced make me think it's eating, but I haven't actually observed this. It looks okay, aside from a bit of cloudiness in the tail fin; I added some salt hoping it may help with that. Fingers crossed.
It just occurred to me now: I will throw a half-dozen or so berried Cherry Shrimp into this tank. This may provide a source of full-time food for the Sucker; worst-case scenario, the shrimp will start up another colony.
It's been stocked with...well, just about everything he can lay his hands on. It contained way too many Goldfish (many of which he got from me), along with numerous Fathead Minnows, a couple of Koi, a few assorted others that he picked up on a whim in local stores or baitshops or from other casual aquarist/pondkeepers. He and his wife are not by any means serious hobbyists; they just like a casual rural lifestyle, and enjoy sitting on the little "dock" I helped him build next to the pond.
So when his wife called and told me about his health downturn and asked me if I would consider coming over and removing/re-homing the fish, I wasn't really looking forward to it, but I also couldn't say no. When I showed up a couple days ago...they're definitely "neighbours" IMHO but they still live about 30 kilometers away...I had with me all the gear of a well-armed collecting expedition. I arrived the day after Ivan got home from the hospital, and it was pretty obvious that the "we" in this project actually meant "me".
After removing 90% of the vegetation, I made a couple of cast-net throws, and they produced lots of fish, mostly Goldies. Then it was time to make a couple of passes with a seine net I had brought, which produced lots more. I won't list all the species present, since many of them were of "questionable" legality. I had already explained to my friends that the re-homing would be done almost entirely into my freezer, with a few choice specimens going into an indoor 75-gallon tank in their rec room. These are country folk; they have livestock and are very pragmatic in terms of life and death "on the farm".
So after a few hours of pleasant labour, interspersed with a few dock-sitting spells of beer drinking, Ivan and I each have 100 or so nice big Goldfish frozen for use as fishing bait this season, and likely well into next winter (as expected). He and his wife have 3 particularly attractive Goldies in their rec-room tank (also as expected).
And I brought home a rescue fish. I had no intentions of doing so, but I also didn't expect to find a couple of Chinese High-fin Suckers (Myxocyprinus asiaticus) in the pond either. Ivan tells me his son purchased 4 of them in town only a few weeks ago and believed they would do well in the pond. Ivan performed what my wife calls a "Ukrainian acclimation", which consists of cutting open the bag and dumping the fish into the pond, then opening a beer.
We found only two (one went into Ivan's basement tank), although I'm sure that we missed a number of assorted fish during our search-and-destroy mission in the pond. I'm going back in a couple days and we plan on pumping the pond almost dry, catching whatever stragglers we missed the first time, and then re-filling the pond and returning a bunch of plants. I'm kinda hoping we don't find more of the suckers then; as interesting as I find this species, it's just too big as an adult for my accommodations. I'm not sure what I will do with the one I have, assuming that it survives.
Currently in a mature 120-gallon tank that housed my Gymno's during the winter; they're outside now so this will be a quarantine for the Sucker. I dumped in a fair quantity of "pond mulm", i.e. fish crap, which I brought home with the fish, and offered it frozen brine shrimp and bloodworms. Its tummy profile and its sudden activity when food is introduced make me think it's eating, but I haven't actually observed this. It looks okay, aside from a bit of cloudiness in the tail fin; I added some salt hoping it may help with that. Fingers crossed.
It just occurred to me now: I will throw a half-dozen or so berried Cherry Shrimp into this tank. This may provide a source of full-time food for the Sucker; worst-case scenario, the shrimp will start up another colony.
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