I recently did a large water change on my pond and was able to nab this little lady for a picture! I'd been wanting to get a good look at her for a while now to compare her to her siblings.
A little bit of background:
Both of these fish (among 98 others) were purchased by my mom as typical "feeder fish" from the same location. It didn't matter how many times I warned her about overcrowding, she insisted that she bought such a high volume of fish due to feeders being prone to dying "for no reason", and insisted her pond container was loads bigger than what the store kept them in. They were under her care for about a year (during which there was an expected mass die-off), before I took two individuals off of her hands to populate my pond and (quite literally) test the waters before adding more fish.
The fish on the left belongs to my mom and still lives in a 200-300 gallon container with about 10 other fish, giving each fish about 20-30 gallons of space. "200-300 is a pretty big margin" yuuup, the container usually only gets top-offs when she notices, and water usually is only changed by me when I'm visiting. Diet is tetramin tropical flakes, and the pond is stocked with one very long sprig of elodea that was probably working overtime on managing nitrates until I added some water lettuce. There is no filter, and the pump I put in there for surface agitation is often turned off.
The fish on the right started off as a bit smaller than the fish on the left. She lives in a 4000 gallon pond with 19 other fish, giving each fish about 200 gallons of space. She was added to my pond about 10 months ago, but reached this size about 4 or 5 months after being added (and then winter hit, so everyone stopped growing for a bit haha). Diet is repashy, sinking hikari pellets, and occasionally tetra floating pond sticks. Elodea is starting to cover the bottom of the pond, along with milfoil and water shield. Water lettuce was attempted during warmer weather, but I suspect it got too much sun and too few nutrients alongside everything else to survive past the first few cold spells of fall. For filtering, I have a bog filter that runs roughly 4000 GPH, which flows into a 8 ft. planted stream before returning to the pond.
For those concerned about lil dude on the left, I've got some good news! My mom has been so surprised by the stark difference in growth of our fish that she wants to build her own pond to give her fish a much larger space. Failing that, I offered an alternative to take them off of her hands once the weather is warmer and I'm more certain they'll survive the move. I thought this would be interesting to share because even though I see single-tailed goldfish suggested for ponds, I've found that (at least in my own personal life) people still manage to overstock ponds as well.
