No, not THAT Brangelina – my Brangelina. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you remember that I’ve been referring to my "very pregnant" fish as "Brangelina."

Sadly, my Brangelina was belly-up between two pond plants Friday night after I got home from work. I guess she wasn’t pregnant afterall. She was one of my original pond fish, purchased five years ago from Caccoosing Creek Ponds and Landscaping on the other side of Sinking Spring. She was also one of my bigger fish measuring well over 10 inches from nose to tail. A mostly white "red comet," she had become severely bloated towards her tail over the last month (suggesting that she was going to lay eggs).

For the past two weeks, she hovered along the bottom of the pond, lethargic to say the least. We thought this was part of the normal process before a fish lays eggs. Maybe she was pregnant and something happened for the worse. Anyway, I like to think she had a good life. As best as we could make it anyway.

We’ve been very fortunate with our fish, she was only the third we’ve lost so far. And since everyone else seems healthy, we hope that she didn’t die from anything contagious.

Yes, I know, it’s only a fish, and although we enjoy our pond and it’s wildlife very much, it’s not the same as losing a dog, cat or other beloved pet. But the fish have come to be part of our lives too. We feed them, clean the filter, sometimes add a little ice to the water when the temp gets too warm. We even cut up oranges last year and threw them into the pond for a treat that they seemed to enjoy.

There are too many to name, but some have characteristics and/or colors that have separated them from the rest
of the school. Our biggest fish is a huge white "whale" of a goldfish with a little red spot on its nose – hence the name "Moby." Then there’s "Red" the biggest of our Red Comets, almost as big as Moby. Copper, a beautiful mostly black Shebunkin, gets its name from the copper coloring splashed across its body.

Also, Nemo, the first baby ever to survive in our pond. Nemo, who’ll be two years old this summer, is almost seven inches from nose to tail and white with orange/gold spritzes throughout. Frosty, the tiny baby fish (only about 1 ½ inches) who was born, surprisingly, sometime over the winter, is all white and still teeny. And our newest "named" fish is one of last year’s babies – a completely black/grey fish who we can hardly ever see, accept when it comes to the top to get food – the Phantom.

A quick check of www.aquariumfish.com states that the average life span of pond goldfish is well over 10 years, assuring us that, pending any unfortunate disease, we should have our fish for quite a while to come. And if this year’s anything like last summer, we’ll have plenty more. Yikes!


Coming this week I’ll tell you all about those Earth Boxes, the Perennial of the Year, the Bubbler and the truth about Solar Lights.

Way back in March, I told my backyard pond story. If you missed it, you can find it in the archives. Today I'm going to get more into the story of my pond's primary inhabitants -- the fish.

Yes, I know I promo'd this yesterday as "Trouble in the Pond," and I'll get into that later. First a little background ...

We started out with a much smaller pond by buying a kit that included two plants and four fancy goldfish (Red Comets, to be exact). We added four more fish that first year -- fancy Shebunkins. Shebunkins are basically more colorful goldfish. They don't require additional care or specific water conditions like Koi, but they come in color combinations similar to the beautiful Japanese carp. Red, gold, silver, black, spreckled or paint, Shebunkins are every bit as beautiful, just not as expensive.

Anyway, the following year our fish gave us four babies that survived spawning season (the fish tend to eat their young, and since they give birth by the hundreds, this is not a bad thing). But before that, I went and bought four more, never thinking in a million years that they would breed!

So now we're up to 16 fish in a 240-gallon pond. (We upgraded to a bigger pond two years ago, because the fish were getting too big for our original pond.) Our biggest fish is almost a foot long from nose to tail tip (and since, she's so big and white, we call her "Moby"), and the other "original" fish are almost the same.

Well last summer, the fish got really busy in the new pond and as far as we can tell, we have about 30-32 fish now (it's hard to count accurately when they're all swimming around). Don't get me wrong, we totally enjoyed watching the tiny babies last year, especially at night. Our pond has three underwater lights, so at night we can spy on the fish and they don't really see us. When we first discovered them, they were only a few millimeters long. All survived the winter and are about 4-5 inches now.

This is all great, except having too many fish in a small pond is not good for them. We have to clean the filter twice as much (that's twice a week in prime summer months), because naturally, they make more waste. And, over the winter in January, I spotted a tiny white fish that must have been born sometime in December (isn't that against the rules of nature?), followed by the discovery just last month of a tiny black fish (the black ones are really hard to see) that was probably born the same time.

Now on to the Trouble in the Pond -- Just the other day I noticed one of our big white Comets (not Moby) looking particularly huge toward her tail section. I think she's pregnant!!! and it's only April (well, actually it's May as of today). In the past the fish waited at least until June to give birth, which means, this is just the first pregnancy of the season ...

I think I'll be having a fish sale this summer!