In an update at the end of my last post, I wrote that the fish in our lotus pot were probably eaten by a bird. Well, the next day Mari and I bought some replacement fish — red-orange medaka at ten for ¥210 — and dropped them into the pot. One half of the pot is covered by lotus leaves, but the other is open to air and predators. We covered the exposed half with laundry bag netting to keep the birds out.
The small volume of water, now teeming with fish, was also turning green. I found an old yogurt cup, bailed out half of the water, then refreshed it. I watched the tiny red-orange medaka, who seemed happy with the clean-up, darting around in the pot. Then, to my surprise, I noticed four or five black ones! All the time I’d been lifting up the lotus pads and staring into the water, wondering where they’d gone or what had eaten them, they had been hiding there, camouflaged (and maybe exhausted?) by the dirty water.
Fifteen fish now swimming in that pot. I think they’ll be safe from birds without the ugly netting, but I worry a bit that they might be overcrowded.
Meanwhile, no lotus flowers yet.
Comments
6 responses to “Return of the fish”
hooray for the new stock of fish! wish i could do the same, but i can’t restock the mosquito fish that died in our pool b/c of some law prohibitting the sale of that breed of fish (isn’t that crazy?!). and i’m scared shitless to make another request to the county. i think they are going to yell at me for killing their precious fish. good luck on your new batch!
Against the law the sell them? Strange. Do you remember what kind they are? Aw, the county can’t expect everyone to be a fish-keeping expert. They’d probably be glad to send you more just to keep you from spraying RAID into the pond. I’d give you some of mine if they’d survive in the mail. They seem to be doing well. The water does get green and smelly, so I’ve been refreshing half of it daily. I’m not sure how to tell if they’re getting enough to eat, though.
I’ve heard that guppies will eat the algae. Also, a small bundle of barley straw is supposed to keep it down too. Unfortunately, sunshine plus fish poop cause the algae, so maybe you are feeding them too much.
Thanks for the tips, Cris. I think that these medaka also eat some of the algae, but boy there’s a lot! I wonder if rice straw would help, too…
The other day I gave four of the fish to Kitaoka-san, and earlier I accidentally poured one down the drain when I was changing the water (oops, sorry!), so at least there will be a little less poop in the water.
The lotus plant is growing really well.
Take it from Nemo… “all drains lead to the sea!”
Well, one day — about two weeks later — I decided to peek into the drain (it’s almost a foot across) to see if I could find the little fish’s body. As it turns out, he (or she) was down there, still alive! I’d been changing some of the water in the pot daily and there had been a couple rainy days, so the water in the drain hadn’t been completely stagnant, and there had probably been enough mosquito larvae hatched in there to sustain the little guy. I couldn’t get the drain cover off, though.
It wasn’t until maybe one more week that a friend was able to pop the drain cover off — like the sword in the stone — and we were able to fish out the lost medaka and return him (or her) to the lotus pot.