Water Gardening: Every single fish is dead and I am in shock, 1 by fredrump

fredrump wrote:
This morning I had another shocking scare. The pond seemed empty. The water was not running and I then saw the fish in a very shallow part where one of my waterfalls normally comes into the pond. As I walked over there it seemed that they were all gasping and dying. I quickly went to check the pumps and found a breaker hade tripped sometime in the last 18 hours or so. I had that breaker replace some time ago because I this had happened before and I thought it was faulty. It's 20 amps and should be enough for my two pumps but in retrospect I better get one breaker for each pump so that one may be still on should the other trip.

As soon as the water started running some of the fish, especially the smaller ones, started swimming around again but all my big ones seemed to be dead or dying. One twitched his tail a bit again and again and started to move from what looked like a grave. I had just purchased an pump with four airstones as I wanted to supply more oxygen to the pond. I hadn't opened the box yet. I quickly went to get the box and put the airstones in the pond at full blast. Miraculously most of the seemingly dead fish woke up again. My biggest, the Big Mamma aka the Red Bandit, is not moving though and seems to be dead. He was probably about 2 feet long and may have been getting old. I don't know yet if any others are beyong hope but it seems that these guys are tough and as soon as you give them oxygen they revive. I've not gone into the pond yet to see what I may find as I don't want to panic anyone in their weakened state. About half the fish are still hiding under the plants either too weak or dead while the other ones are merrily swimming around.

I am really surprised though as to how quickly a pond can become deadly without running water and a fresh supply of oxygen. I can't imagine how fish stay alive under ice when no air comes into the pond. I just had a generator installed as I remember being out of power for a week when Wilma went through here but I didn't know that less then a day can be so deadly.

Here a picture of Big Mamma lying on her side dead as a doornail.

Fred

Here's a shot of