No pictures today - The camera is on vacation without me!

Update on the baby population. It looks like we are down from hundreds to maybe 20 or 30 baby fish. We are pretty upset about losing so many, but the ones we have are looking really good.

Theories - The most likely is that we overfed them with crushed dry fish food creating a pollution in the water that killed them. We really feel terrible about it and even more, we feel pretty darned stupid. Next time, we'll know better.

Other theories are:
Large frog population is winning the war for pond territory. We are having an unusual year for frogs. We generally have one or two frogs a year, but this year, there are at least 5 and probably more young frongs living in the pond. Could they have eaten the very small fry?

Gloucester water??? We know Gloucester is adding chloramines to its wter this year and we know that cholramines in the water kill goldfish. What we didn't know is that sometimes Rockport taps into Gloucester's water supply. Did we accidentally add chloramine water to our pond? If so, were the big ones affected? It doesn't appear so. Only the very small babies died.

Too many plants - the water hyacinths have taken over in such good weather. Were there somany plants that there wasn't enough surface area to provide sufficient oxygen to the fish? We have a fountain and a waterfall in the pond. Probably not the cause....

Anyway - the biggest baby is now 3 inches long and she is a beauty!! Lovely yellow ogan (metallic.)

We have two red heads and we are hoping to keep one of them for ourselves. We also have several with yellow heads and several blacks and oranges.

More next week!! (with pictures!)