Hey, exciting things happening in my pond tonight. I have a spotlight I trained on the water so I can see the fish. They're usually pretty active at night, nabbing insects drawn by the floodlight, but tonight it's different. Three of them are chasing the largest fish, a big gold one, all around the pond. This behavior indicates they may spawn soon.
I really hope the big one's a female and there's at least one male in her entourage! I did some reading tonight and see that goldfish sometimes exhibit this behavior even when the whole population is one sex. We've never had baby fish, so I'm really hopeful there will be a spawn. :)
We had one 5" shubunkin already, and someone on our local Freecycle.com list gave me three other comets. The largest - the popular one tonight - is probably 7" nose to base of tail, with nice long fins past that. All three of the fish she gave us are healthy and doing just great!
We may have spawning soon
I hope you get lots of babies. We must have 20,000 little bitty rosy minnows in the pond. And everywhere are tiny baby toads.
I go out with a spotlight and look at my pond at night too. You are right about all the action, especially when the bullfrogs are feeling romantic. lol
I keep hoping for babies but I have the feeling mine are all one sex
I have 2 HUGE Koi
12-14 inches at least
plus 3 that are probably 7-8 inches
Maybe mine eat all theirs?
CC-That's what happened with my "breeding" pair of fantail pigeons. They both turned out to be female.
Ya'll should get some rosy monnows. They are cheap, eat skeeters, and breed
like crazy.
They're at it again tonight, everyone chasing the big goldie. They especially seem to like the corner of the pond closest to us. At times, they're all in one twisting, splashing frenzy, then the chase is on again. Sure hope there's a representation of both sexes here! The anticipation's killing us, LOL.
We'll have to look into rosy minnows. They're pretty. http://www.fishpondinfo.com/rosies.htm
We finally picked up a few tropical fish for our now empty 55gal setup (our lone surviving shubunkin spent the early part of the spring in there after spring thaw). We have 5 tiger barbs, 1 striped raphael catfish, and 2 dwarf gourami. We'll let them settle in for a few weeks, monitoring water quality, and start adding more little by little. I'll probably start a post in the pets forum about them, though!