when i got up this morning, all my fish were dead..(about 40 of them).. i am wondering how could this of happened..they have lived quite happily in their pond for ages...does anyone have any answers... my son said it was probably birds, but i cant see how they would all die overnite from birds...i have a 6foot fence round my place so, nobody can get in to harm them..some are just lying in the bottom of the pond, but not moving...the others were floating on the top..its a mystery...

Oh dear, that's awful.
My story wont help you, but I killed all mine (they lived in an aquarium) by using a brand new pot scrubber to clean the glass. I hadn't rinsed it first.

Here's hoping someone can shed some light on the mystery for you...
M

wow, that was a bit of bad luck,...you would think a new pot mit would be clean enuff for fish..

PEP

I think the best thing you can do is take some of them to your local vet so he can do a Post Mortem on them and find out the cause of death. As one who has worked in the Post Mortem room in an animal health lab. I have seen this on numerous occasions. Don't do as many people do ,go out and get more goldfish and put them straight into the pond. It will have to be cleaned out and sterilised but make sure you get the formula from your local vet. Lets know how you get on . The best of luck.

golly, that would cost heaps..it will be awhile befor i get new fish as i am making a new pond area... (with a new pond)..the old pond will be used for waterlillies...at least they still look healthy..thanks for the advice benny, i will remember that if it ever happens again..

I had a bit of a scare when my 6yr old lab was pretty sick late last week so I took him to the vet to find out what the problem was. I left him overnite at the vet then not long after we got home we found out that parvo in the area was around that knocks a numbers of dogs over also 1 or 2 was fatal. So i phone the vet to see if was parvo , thank goodness it wasn't. He was very constipated and he come right within 24 to 48 hrs. I waste no time getting Gundy his parvo injection!!!

hi gundy..parvo is bad.. you dont wanna have anything to do with it...i had a puppy once (pep), and she got it...luckily it was at the early stage when i took her to the vet...she was so very ill, and was so sad to watch her suffer...but against all odds, she made it... she was my best friend, and she lived 16 happy years.....

Hi i have been web surfing all morning and feel more frustrated and confused than before. We have a beautiful fancy fish aquarium it holds 400 litres of water and has approx 25 fish, 10 really big ones and the rest small ish. We have had our aquarium for nearly a year and absolutely love it, it has become a great talking point. My trouble is that we didnt know much about it when we got into it but we continue to learn as we go. Just lately we have had a real issue with the smelling of the tank. We weekly or at the latest every second week change 50% of the water as well as clean the filter and clean the stones when we do the water change everything gets cleaned with the aquarium water. We put water conditioner in as well as the stress liquid and even put the aquarium salt in. BUT even with doing all of this it still smells. We feed our fish the sinking pellets as at the start we had a number of fish get swim bladder so were told the pellets were the best things to use. We dont feed the fish every day sometimes leave it for 3 days as we were told by a pet shop this is ok. Hence my frustration after looking on the net for advice to be seeing on some sites fish should be feed once daily another site twice daily. Then with water changes some say 20% some say 50%. Can someone please tell me what we really should be doing. We dont have a lot of turnover with fish so must be doing something right or are just really lucky. My husband was wondering if we should go back to using flakes for feeding im scared we will have trouble with swim bladder again. We have just got our nieces and nephews into fish as well so dont want to be giving them any wrong advice. Please help, Thanks

Pep, years ago, my dad had half a dozen goldfish in a backyard pond. One day he found one floating on the top and the others were showing signs of distress and seemed to have blisters on their skin.

He whipped the dead one up to the local vet and after a short conversation they came to the conclusion that it was the soil in the potted water lily that was the problem.

Where, before, dad had usually just used garden soil for the lily he decided to give it a boost and used a bagged fertiliser. The poor fish didn't stand a chance against all those chemicals in such a small space.

I'd love to know if you found the reason for the loss of your fish, Pep.

Coll009, I used to work in a geriatric hospital and they had fish tanks dotted around the place. We were always losing fish to over-feeding.

As in all places like that, the `duty' was designated to one staff member but it seemed that no-one could resist feeding them as they went passed.

The result was polluted water and over-fed (and often) dead fish.

The business professional who rented all the acquariums to the hospital used to go ballistic of course, because it was costing him time and money to keep coming out to clean the tanks and replace fish.

He told us that the fish were to be fed once a day only and only one granule per fish.

Hope that helps.