Re: NANFA-L-- cement pond survey

Todd D. Crail (tcrail at UTNet.UToledo.Edu)
Thu, 8 Sep 2005 13:56:48 -0400

----- Original Message -----
From: <Prizma at aol.com>
>
> any ideas or suggestions for more reproduction and health in outdoor
pools?

Like I said in March... Sand, man. It may make more sense to build refugia
with the sand than put it directly into the See-Mint Pond, but the benefits
in the orders of magnitude of surface area are incredible. You have that
much more surface area for primary production, primary consumption, which
turns into all sorts of food etc etc etc ad nauseum. Diverse algae species
will form in the system, balancing the overall productivity budget for the
system... Thus alleviating a situation where a couple species are dominating
and overpopulating (green water or hair algae blooms which screws up
vascular plant physiology and aestetics). You get the whole party started
with a bucketfull of stuff from the local creek... I just can't say enough
good about the use of sand.

To illustrate, I had one of those 220 gallon preform ponds. I had 8
pumpkinseeds, 4 northern longear, 2 orangespots and a warmouth in it. I
never fed the thing all spring, summer and fall. I didn't get any fry, of
course, and lost the orangespots... But everyone else was FAT and happy.
They actually lost mass when I brought them inside.

In short... The method works great inside. Outside, it seems to be
unstopable. Try it in a couple different containers to see what happens,
run different treatments. I think you'll find the same results as I've
found.

And secondly... I would like to say how much you rock Casper, and how lucky
we are to have you among our ranks of native fish personalities. I have
this new lady friend, and I felt like I was introducing my family when we
started talking about the characters one finds in NANFA. Needless to say...
She's quite interested to meet El Snorkelmeister :)

She also gave me this idea to make a "You might be right for NANFA if..."

- You ever crossed multiple state lines to get fish. (warm)
- You used half your vacation to cross multiple state lines to get fish.
(hot)
- You came back from using half your vacation to cross multiple state lines
to get fish, only to have it pointed out to you that you didn't take any
pictures of you, your buddy or the people you stayed with, but still somehow
managed to take over 200 megabytes of pictures. (burnin' up!)

It's all about the fish.

Todd
The Madness (tm)
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