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This year Carolyn and I completely redone our pond by increasing it's size and adding waterfalls and a 45' streambed. After getting all done with this "massive" project this year we decided to add some living creatures to the pond, other than the water bugs and frogs that seem to magically appear when water is present. We decided to add some very tiny baby goldfish - 14 to be exact. They were so tiny that it was hard to even see them in the murky waters of the pond. I gingerly dumped them from the bag they were in, into the pond and you could just feel the happiness of them being in their new home (a mansion compared to where they came from!). I watched them for a while and they seemed to be doing just fine.
Now mind you, the pump I have to pump water from the pond to the bio-filter 60' away is 4100 gph. I went and did some yard work for a couple hours and then came back to check on the fish. I couldn't find them, which really was no big deal to me as we have a lot of foliage on and in the pond. I did my usual trek up the streambed just to watch the water and noticed a small piece of something caught in one of the rocks in the stream - IT WAS ONE OF THE FISH! I stopped dead in my tracks and just looked back at the pond thinking, "What have I done??" I started to do a frantic search through the waters in the pond to locate the fish and could only find a couple. I then shut down the pump and drained the bio-filter to see, that just maybe, these fish got sucked into the filter and took a 4 second ride to the bio-filter. YUP, there they were, about 6-7 from what I could count on the mangled carcasses. I felt like a murderer. These poor little guys and gals got sucked into the impeller of the pump and got "rocketed" into my bio-filter.
I ended up buying a filter cover for my pump to salvage the only 2 I had left.
Now the story doesn't end there. One of our Association members (Lisa Harmison) said she would donate some of her baby goldfish to me. So I arranged a day where I could come pick them up, which ended up not working out on that day. A couple days later I noticed several larger and some smaller goldfish swimming in the pond so I assumed Lisa had brought them over - Not so according to Lisa! Hmmmm, now where did these goldfish come from? I know for sure that I had lost almost all of the goldfish in the "tube ride" from the carcasses I found. Do these goldfish just magically appear like water bugs do? Anyway, we have happy active fish now. We have a protected pump, and the "tube ride" is now closed to anything other than water.