Should I Be Worried About Not Feeding the Pond Fish?

We got Julie from Perry Township. ‘I have a question about our pond. We lost all our koi during the winter, and we had 11 goldfish, and our pond now, we haven’t fed them for almost two weeks now. Our pond is about half full of lily pads, but they’re like they’re hiding under there. Are they fine?’

So they’re actually hiding in the shade. The lily pad’s kind of like a covered patio for us out back, and so a lot of times in the summer months, they will be underneath the lily pads. The other thing that sometimes happens with lily pads is they get a little bug on them called an aphid, and they’re a natural food for the fish, and the fish will come up underneath those lily pads, and they’ll actually nibble the aphids off of them. So they’re kind of like a self-cleaner in the pond, too, and it’s not uncommon to see them kind of hang out under the lily pads in the shade in the structure. Most fishermen will always try to run a lure right beside the edge of a patch of lily pads because they’re hanging out underneath there naturally. They’re doing what fish normally do.

Thank you, Julie. I would say at some point you do want to feed the fish because the fish, if they’re eating the fish food that we sell, it’s a very high-protein fish food. And what that extra energy and nutrients does is it packs a fat layer on the fish, and then when we stop feeding the fish in around, you know, October, November, then the fish are gonna live off that fat layer as they go dormant and stay at the bottom of the pond. So there is something to be said for feeding them a little bit here in the late summer, early fall, so that they can build up that fat reserve, because that’s what they’ll feed off of.

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