Pondings

 I thought it might be good to provide an update on the fishpond that we incorporated into the middle deck. The photo is very representative of what it and the deck look like at present with all the rain that we have been having. But it's not precipitation that is the focus of this posting but rather the ecosystem that has been developing within the pond. The pond is now just over two years old and we've been through two filters in that time. We now have a super-dooper filter where the filtering is done in a large plastic canister which is under the house. Water is sucked up through the pump and then transferred via tubing into the filter where it passes through several mechanical and biological filters before being returned to the pond.
The question of what kinds of fish to inhabit the pond has been a difficult one. I had wanted to go with natives but Australian schooling fish that spend a lot of time near the surface are mostly, at least in terms of what's available commercially, are mostly rainbow fish of northern Australia. They do fine during the warmer months but died during the winter. I reluctantly put goldfish in about 18 months ago but they proved messy so I've now relocated them into the big greeny-blue pot you can see to the left of the pond.
Instead, the pond is now alive with white cloud mountain minnows.

 I think I bought about a dozen just over twelve months ago and now I have a school of about 70 or so. I like them because they do spend most of their time in a big school, and while at first glance they appear silvery when you look closely you see the splash of colour of the red of their tail and a hint of yellow along their backs. I'm hoping that the pond will be able to support quite a large school of these guys. They don't eat frogs' eggs or tadpoles either.

 Apart from the fish, and the various aquatic invertebrates such as water spiders and backswimmers that somehow make their way, unassisted, into the pond, I have also bought three Mystery Snails to help check the algae. While the super-dooper filter includes a UV light which is supposed to kill most algae cells, it clearly isn't able to deal with all the algae cells present so the pond does have a fair coating of algae over its sides. In the height of summer this was starting to get a little out of control, hence the addition of the snails. At $3 per snail, these guys didn't come cheap!

These snails have an interesting and somewhat unexpected way of laying their eggs. The eggs are laid in this 'cocoon' like structure laid about 10cm above the water level. The eggs take about 2-3 weeks to hatch. Mine hatched about a fortnight ago, so I'm hoping to see these babies when they grow in size over the next few months. No doubt they shall slow their growth down over winter, but hopefully by next spring they will have grown large enough to be seen.