Fish Autumn Update

Folks who’ve been around a while may remember the matter of our fish. I’d spent some time in the spring describing ways to estimate a population using techniques other than just counting everybody. And then revealed that the population of goldfish in our pond was something like 53, based on counting the fifty which we’d had wintering over in our basement and the three we counted in the pond despite the winter ice. This is known as determining the population “by inspection”.

This is the backyard pond; pictured are several fish, though not all of them.

I’m disappointed to say that, as best we can work out, they didn’t get around to producing any new goldfish this year. We didn’t see any evidence of babies, and haven’t seen any noticeably small ones swimming around. It’s possible we set them out too late in the spring. It’s possible too that the summer was never quite warm enough for them to feel like it was fish-production time.

This does mean that we have a reasonably firm upper limit on the number of fish we need to take in. 53 appears to be it. And the winter’s been settling in, though, and we’ve started taking them in. This past day we took in twelve. That’s not bad for the first harvest and if we’re lucky we should have the pond emptied in a week or so. I’ll let folks know if there turn out to be a surprise in goldfish cardinality.