Goldfish Dying... Someone Help!

[Calley]

Everyone is at their own level of ponding. I know all about the farm life and understand where your coming from. I remember we used to keep goldfish in the large outside horse trough, year round with nothing to comfort their lives!!!! The horses would stomp inside the trough at the fishes!

Hahahaha that reminds me I used to have a horse named Jacob who was obsessed with water.... he'd try to jump inside of his water trough and he'd take the water bucket in the stall and try to dump it on himself! Once he escaped from his little paddock and we found him in the creek, rolling around... I was so sad when he passed away!
Although I have never actually had my fish in THE water trough, my pond is comparable to one, similar in size.

 

[Tula]

Seriously, folks, we're talking 150 gallons here. A powerful pond air pump would blow the fish clean out of the water!! TWELVE LARGE AIRSTONES, Dave? There'd be no ROOM for fish!!
John

Oh dear......we can't have that! LOL !

I'm sure there are some smaller air pumps that could be used. I was shocked at the roiling water my new air pump created this summer. I've since located the diffusers more strategically and the koi are no longer spooked by them.....they actually frolic in the air column!!! I also worried, as my lilies got blasted to the sides of the pond....but they've since rebounded too. I think I should have gotten the smaller model, but now we're all used to it.

 

[dieselplower]

Yes I have pondered a few of these things... but I am not sure what to think. Yes all of the fish were floating sideways at the top when I found them at about 4 in the morning, I guess they could have been to the bottom at some point of the night that I wasn't there?
I thought about the well water too... Dave thinks that the water disrupted the two layers. And I realized today that there is a lot of air in the water when I use it. Even the kitchen faucet has a lot of air pockets that come through it.
I'm thinking when I get an aerator it will be the smallest outdoor one I can find, because I agree that the fish won't have much room!
My pump for the waterfall is actually located at the top, for ease of access reasons because we usually have to clean the pump out a lot.
The water temperature thing is still confusing me, my hose is attached to a spigot coming off of the side of my house. The water would have come out of the well and had to travel out of the well, through the house, through the pipes to the basement, then through the hose. I'm thinking it wasn't as cold as I thought it was. Also I keep my fish in the pond through the winter, and just use an electric pond heater to melt a hole in the ice so that they can breathe. So the fish have survived a LOT of cold water before.
What do you guys think @dieselplower @Dave 54

In a pond of that size I do not believe there would be different temperature layers

 

[Calley]

Alright that's what I thought, I think that the pond might vary a little in degrees from top to bottom but nothing major!

 

[Fishylove]

Oxygen deprivation can happen in a 5 gallon bucket, but I digress, looking over this thread I don't believe we've established ammonia or nitrates? Do we know these numbers?

 

[dieselplower]

Oxygen deprivation can happen in a 5 gallon bucket, but I digress, looking over this thread I don't believe we've established ammonia or nitrates? Do we know these numbers?

It's going to be zero considering it was a 100% water change. Unless they are in the tap water.

 

[CometKeith]

Hi Calley, Again sorry about your fish, but there have been numerous times people have had a pond a number of years and boom the fish start dying because of insufficient O2. It usually starts with the largest fish and they are found dead in the morning. Typically this is because the amount of oxygen in the pond is insufficient for the bio-load that has grown over the years. You didn't state how large your koi and goldfish were but it is not recommended to keep koi in a pond under 1000 gallons. I have a pond considerably larger than yours and I would never consider having koi in my pond. I think that because your pond was probably teetering on being at the level of insufficient dissolved oxygen in the water any incident could have pushed it off the edge. By displacing the oxygen rich water at the top this caused your problem,.Something probably would have happened in the near future anyway, but it might not been mass fish dying at once and you would have had time to make some adjustments before more died.

 

[Fishylove]

Oxygen deprivation can happen in a 5 gallon bucket, but I digress, looking over this thread I don't believe we've established ammonia or nitrates? Do we know these numbers?

It's going to be zero considering it was a 100% water change. Unless they are in the tap water.

What they were before the water was added... One should always check parameters before adding water.

 

[dieselplower]

What they were before the water was added... One should always check parameters before adding water.

It doesn't matter what they were previously. The fish were fine before the change.

 

[Shan]

Sorry about your loss. I wonder of something toxic is in the ground water? Prozac? Pesticides? Who knows? In such large amounts, maybe it killed your fish.

 

[Mucky_Waters]

I am confused how adding tons of new water could lead to oxygen depletion. All the new water SHOULD have a high oxygen content. Also, I do not believe stratification of this magnitude can happen in such a small pond. .

The answer to this one is simple. Well water is devoid of oxygen. There is very little free oxygen underground.
It takes water a while to absorb oxygen, and if you are replacing the oxygenated water with the un-oxygenated well water faster then that water can absorb fresh oxygen the fish will begin to suffocate.
DP is correct that stratification of that magnitude is highly unlikely in a small pond like that with any water movement at all.

 

[dieselplower]

The answer to this one is simple. Well water is devoid of oxygen. There is very little free oxygen underground.
It takes water a while to absorb oxygen, and if you are replacing the oxygenated water with the un-oxygenated well water faster then that water can absorb fresh oxygen the fish will begin to suffocate.
DP is correct that stratification of that magnitude is highly unlikely in a small pond like that with any water movement at all.

That is a good answer. It had not occured to me. If that is true (I am not saying it isn't) then I would say this is the best answer so far.

 

[Mucky_Waters]

Further to this discussion, I knew a guy who bought a piece of acreage and drilled a well on it. Turns out he didn't have to go down very far and the the water came gushing out under it's own pressure. They call it an artesian well, or "artesian aquifer". Needless to say he was pretty happy since no pump was required down in the well itself. Anyway, the well also produced a very good volume of water and he began looking in to ways of utilizing this water and started investigations into raising trout on his property. The short version of the story was that he found out it wasn't feasible because the low DO (dissolved Oxygen) content of the water coming out of his artesian well wouldn't support the trout. Of course there was ways to oxygenate the water before flowing into the trout ponds, but it would have required considerable pre-treatment and investment of equipment that he wasn't prepared to make.

 

[Calley]

It doesn't matter what they were previously. The fish were fine before the change.

My fish were normal as they always were, swimming around. I know the oxygen deprivation article said that characteristics of an upcoming pond stratification were that the fish tend to swim near the top. My fish almost always swim near the bottom of the pond, unless they see me coming with the fish food container. @Fishylove

 

[Calley]

Sorry about your loss. I wonder of something toxic is in the ground water? Prozac? Pesticides? Who knows? In such large amounts, maybe it killed your fish.

Well if there is some sort of chemical that killed the fish, wouldn't i know? All of my farm animals drink the water, and all of the people in my house do too.