Hello All! I wanted to share my lil' mini pond I'v had set up for a year.
Seemed like a fun thing to get started, and it has been but not without some pitfalls.
It now houses just three betta splendens ( 2 females 1 male) they all live relatively well together. every once in awhile one will try to upstage the dominate female, but they all have their own territories in the pond to look after.
I used to have it full of guppy,platy fry and adult guppies (the guppies not sucha good idea with betta, pretty dumb of me) but after a rough winter and one of my heaters breaking I lost all the platies and half the guppy fry. All the Betta (6 at the time) fish survived the winter despite a drop of about 55 degrees in the pond one night.
It wasn't until last spring that I ran into the biggest crash. Since the substrate was just rock gravel, and I had been pretty lazy about cleaning the pond all winter, I went to vacuum the gravel and give the pond a nice cleaning and suddenly a bunch of large gas bubble burst to the surface releasing (you can probably guess) a whole lot of anaerobic bacteria. needless to say I lost pretty much every thing in the pond except 3 betta splendens and 2 white cloud minnows.
After all that I decided to keep the pond bare bottom, save for some large rock, hid-e-hole pots, and drift wood.
Currently my maintenance routine has been vacuuming the bottom once a month and topping the water off when it gets too low.
I keep one large amazon planted in a pot. I have allot of floaters (frogbit, Water Hyacinths) keeping the pond shaded and clean.
here are some pics:
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some zippity hard to photograph minnows and my male betta, checking for some food:
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the delta female:
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and the ever so plump and always hunger red female:
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every once in awhile the pond gets a visitor, in this case some kinda little frog
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the hard working mystery snail seems to always find the filter interesting
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normally this means he want something else besides left overs to eat, so I'll throw a blanched cucumber in for him on occasion.
Currently I'm prepping for winter and will need to invest in another heater for the pond. I have a heater in their now that keeps the water at 75 degrees always, but come winter that heater will need some help.
I might try to jerry rig some kind of wind blocking device to keep the draft down.