My beautiful baby ghostI knew there had to be hatchlings -- "fry" in English, or "alevins" in French -- in there, since I have seen the females swollen with eggs and the males chasing them around, nudging their sides to get them to release those riches in future spawn, and I just saw the first set of eyeballs on an eyelash (I didn't make that up myself) darting from the algae at the edge of the basin toward the middle.
Which deepens my suspicion of what the fish have really been doing these last few days: gathering around the groups of fertilized eggs, eating the fry as they emerge.
The Annual Homeowners' Association Fish Fry!
Now I know how I am going to spend way too much of my time today, wearing my Indiana Jones red gardening hat against the sun: watching my fish-pond-in-a-fountain's answer to Survivor. It's a Darwinian life.
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2 commentaires:
And you never put some aside in another basin so they grow up a bit ?
No, I don't, which is not to say that I don't think about it. I do. However, the belief that nature must rule wins out over my desire to intervene. Once I do, I have to create a separate system to feed and nurture them. I could do this, but I learned that I like knowing that the fish who survived last season and play with the school this year, are the fish that were able to outlast the bigger ones.
Were I to save them, I might save too many, and the population would balloon quickly for the capacity of the basin to support them. This way, there is a gentle, natural population of the 6,600 liter (give or take) basin, other than the fish I have acquired to boost its population after the terrible freeze we had on top of the leak in January 2009.
Letting nature decide who makes it adds to my sense of wonder and appreciation of its own ways and intelligence.
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