The pleasures of a pond at twilight

One of my favorite times to visit the pond is right at sundown, when the colors are intense, the fish are comfy, and the lights are beginning to come on.

What a week! Injury! Rescue!

I can tell you one thing about keeping fish: the adventures never stop.

Monday, I saw a swollen lump on Harley, my white dominate wakin. I prepared a quarantine bucket so that I could examine him. I feared he was manifesting the dreaded wakin cancer. After posting pictures on the web, a diagnosis of impacted scale or scrape emerged, so I kept him in isolation and treated with Melafix. One can treat wounds in the pond, but why treat the whole pond with that expensive elixir when merely dosing a bucket will save lots of $$. Happily, the swelling is down and the wound almost gone in three days.

Bumpkin’s predicament proved worse. I got up early to put out the trash, and I was glad I did. I found my beautiful Bumpkin lying motionless on the patio bricks! A second jumper in a month.

Fortunately, she was still breathing, so I tossed her back in the pond. I had heard that cyprinids could survive outside water, sometimes for hours. In fact, that is how koi cultivation started; workers in Japanese rice paddies smuggled the mutated, more colorful carp home in their pockets.

She lay on her side on the surface for a few moments, breathing heavily. I tried to clean as much dirt as possible off her with my finger. After about ten minutes, she righted herself and started swimming normally albeit slowly. She has spent the morning swimming slowly about, mostly hanging by herself. The only visible ill effects of the out-of-pond experience are clamped dorsal and anal fins, and a dull appearance due to the erosion of the slime coat.

There was no thunderstorm or other loud noise that I know of, and the water tests clean, so I guess I need to devise a strategy to block my fish from jumping out.

UPDATE: As of nightfall, Bumpkin is still alive, but she has taken to bottom-sitting. She moves every few minutes and responds to stimuli, but she isn’t eating or swimming long distances. I hope she recovers from her trauma.

UPDATE 6/15: Bumpkin is beginning to swim slowly from place to place. There still seems to be some stringy mess attached to her. I might try to give her a cleaning soon if it doesn’t fall off.

UPDATE 6/16: She is swimming more and has resumed eating. She rests a lot, but nearer the surface, not on the bottom. Her tail fin has rotted from a comet shape to a short tail like a common. The other fins are okay, though the anal fins are clamped.

Back from LA to a mini-crisis

I returned from my trip to Book Expo America to find my fish thriving, but the pump in the back pond malfunctioning. The flow barely made a trickle, and the water reeked. I asked my neighbor, who dutifully fed the fish in my absence, when it had quit, and he said it had slowed down the last couple of days.

I quickly installed my backup pump, cleaned the filter and pond bottom, and performed a 20% water change. There seem to be no ill effects of the slowdown – thank god I had a healthy complement of plants!

All the fish and plants seem to be thriving as spring trends into summer – we will have temperatures in the 90s this weekend. Oddly, even though I am enjoying my second water lily bloom, the first land lily bloomed today.  The new Hawai’ian fish have grown quickly as well.