Hi to all - can't believe I never found this site in over two years of pond researching. I'm not too experienced with threaded forums, so I hope any helpful and/or local souls will email me.
I'm in charge of our giant native plant butterfly garden at our church. We put in the pond in June of 2004 and only stocked it with guppies to keep down the mosquitos. That November we added some feeder goldfish that had been won at the church bazaar. Big surprise to find that two of them had lived through the winter and are now over six inches long! They have never been fed - living on God's bounty - and they haven't bred - thank that same Father Nature! I had never had any experience with a pond, though I studied a great deal and we have been blessed with great water quality. My initial plan was to put in native fish only, but now we will also have Mary and Margaret or Peter and Paul, whatever.
I did buy snails and also had some introduced on plants so that we had quite an infestation at first. But now the fish have almost completely eliminated them. I've tried to feed the fish but they have no clue. We expanded the pond a little: I think it may be 700 gals with a waterfall and just over 24 inches deep. It has about 1/4 inch layer of dirt over the liner and there is quite a supply of red worms and frogs. It is semi-shaded and gets a fair amount of leaf detritus. It is well planted and has hiding places. It is not connected to nor near any natural water source.
I really need advice and sources for species and amount of native fishes to add to the pond. Initially I was looking for Florida flag fish to keep down the snails - not a problem now. I was also interested in topminnows and any other colorful fish - the same still holds. There is a small problem with hair algae, so possible help with that would be good. Feeding will be problematical - I don't believe that we want to get on a daily schedule. Can we have some heavy breeders that will feed the others? I'm not looking for a "swarm" of fish - I just want the pond to have a little more life than the two fish we have now and to be as natural as possible. I hope that vision is not the impossible dream.
Any and all responses will be greatly appreciated. Major road work has been going on nearby (finished now) and silt has killed many of our oxygenating plants, so I'd appreciate suggestions on them as well - no anacharis, thank you.
THANK YOU to all who are reading this introduction - I'm sure I've put all this info and questions in the wrong place. I'm going to go back and try to find my local members and get their kind attention.
God bless all of us, who are in love with His creation!

sail fin molly's(Poecilia latipinna I think?) will eat almost any type of hair algae.

for snail's I would recomend olive nerites (Neritina reclivata), they are probably available at any launching ramp on brackish water, the problem with snails is often they breed so prolifically that they overwhelm the system they are in ( you can end up with 1000's) Olive Nerites cannot reproduce in fresh water, I put about 100 or so in a 125 heavily planted tank, they lay eggs all the time but they never hatch.

off the top of my head i can't think of many Native fish that would be highly visible in a pond (koi, and goldfish were selectively breed to have visible colors) but I am sure some of the other board members will have a few suggestions.

for feeding, throw about 10 pieces of fish food in the pond once a day, every day at about the same time (you can scoop it out after an hour or so but with your size pond i would not bother). With in a few days/weeks the gold fish will find the food once they find the food you can drop back to a feeding schedule that is more manageable.

as for places to buy native fish:

try the vender section here
I have bought fish/collecting supplies/and food from Ksi, Jonah's, and Avid with great results, i have not as of yet had opportunity to buy from OhioDarters, or BTDarters.

also try here: Sach's System Aquaculture

I have bought fish from Paul several times, and will in the future.


my 2 cents

I have been using small ponds to breed sunfish for a couple years now and have never fed them when they are in the ponds and have been very successful at spawning them. My point is they need food to be able to produce eggs and spawn and my ponds are much smaller than yours so I honestly don't see much of a need to feed them. With some plant life and being outdoors comes aquatic insects and larvae of all sorts of macroinvertebrates and of course algae that some species do consume. In your area I think I would suggest florida flag fish because they eat algae and possibly some killifish ( there are many different species) and maybe some heterandria formosa (a very small livebearer) and of course I always recomend a sunfish and in your case and to go along with these other small species I mentioned go with any of the three Enneacanthus species (Banded, bluespotted, and blackbanded sunfish). If you don't try to over due it and put 4-5 of each of these I think they would be fine without much feeding. These are all small fish and some are rather atractive fish.

If it won't upset anyone too much I think I would remove the goldfish being larger fish they may consume a large portion of available food and besides if you realy want this to be a natives pond, they arn't natives. All of the fish I mentioned should be found in your local area more or less and if you do a little research you likely could find them yourself rather than purchaseing them.

I hope this helps, feel free to ask more questions.

Oh ya and I would go along with the above post that sailfin mollys would also be a good choice and can be found in your area.

What a fund of information - thank you so much! I did find the venders and their good reputations. I'll post more ?'s off the "welcome" board.

If it won't upset anyone too much I think I would remove the goldfish being larger fish they may consume a large portion of available food and besides if you realy want this to be a natives pond, they arn't natives. All of the fish I mentioned should be found in your local area more or less and if you do a little research you likely could find them yourself rather than purchaseing them.

I hope this helps, feel free to ask more questions.

Oh ya and I would go along with the above post that sailfin mollys would also be a good choice and can be found in your area.
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Thank you so much for all the information. I'm afraid the goldfish are staying. My initial plan was for only natives, but I've come to love them and they certainly have helped us take care of the pond. Will the mollies overwinter? We keep the waterfall on and the water can get down to the 40's occasionally. Whatever fish I put in there to control beginning algae and mosquitos didn't make it through the winter. I'll continue on the other boards - thanks again.

If it won't upset anyone too much I think I would remove the goldfish being larger fish they may consume a large portion of available food and besides if you realy want this to be a natives pond, they arn't natives. All of the fish I mentioned should be found in your local area more or less and if you do a little research you likely could find them yourself rather than purchaseing them.

I hope this helps, feel free to ask more questions.

Oh ya and I would go along with the above post that sailfin mollys would also be a good choice and can be found in your area.
Thank you so much for all the information. I'm afraid the goldfish are staying. My initial plan was for only natives, but I've come to love them and they certainly have helped us take care of the pond. Will the mollies overwinter? We keep the waterfall on and the water can get down to the 40's occasionally. Whatever fish I put in there to control beginning algae and mosquitos didn't make it through the winter. I'll continue on the other boards - thanks again.

Sailfin mollys will definatly make it over the winter, the guppys that you put in the pond are tropical thats why they did not make it. Mosquito fish (Gambusia affinis) are voracious predators, about the size of a small guppy. You can probably get some out of any ditch that keeps standing water in it. would take care of any mosquito problem you have, if you have mosquito fish you really need some sort of small sunfish to keep their numbers down, blue spot sunfish, black banded sunfish would do very well in that pond , perhaps orange spot sunfish would work as well. These fish work well in ponds but they will be hard to see (infact you may never see one at all, until the pond is drained for some type of maintance.)

Florida flag fish are another native fish option for your pond.

Sailfin mollys will definatly make it over the winter, the guppys that you put in the pond are tropical thats why they did not make it. Mosquito fish (Gambusia affinis) are voracious predators, about the size of a small guppy. You can probably get some out of any ditch that keeps standing water in it. would take care of any mosquito problem you have, if you have mosquito fish you really need some sort of small sunfish to keep their numbers down, blue spot sunfish, black banded sunfish would do very well in that pond , perhaps orange spot sunfish would work as well. These fish work well in ponds but they will be hard to see (infact you may never see one at all, until the pond is drained for some type of maintance.)

Thank you!

mollies and flagfish are both active algae eaters, mollies are very easy to breed,kids love them, and they are gentle, but suseptible to fungus infections if water quality deteriorates, flagfish are egglayers, and sometimes aggressive, i think the goldfish would suck up eggs, and they are dirty, i'm not sure if they are aggressive, but they are very large, mosquitofish are tiny guppy like fish but very aggressive fry eaters, fin nippers, and generally a problem for all small fish, perhaps if you need to control mosquitoes, and want to keep the goldfish, the mosquito fish would be good, they are small and almost invisible in general, but in fl. many males are marbled bright black/white , quite pretty and very active