Container ponds?

[Joshua Morgan]

Would an outdoor container pond during the warmer months be a good way to breed Paros? Of course, this is assuming that I could acquire the necessary amount of water to fill the pool…hopefully rainwater would help keep it full after that.

[Bill Little]

This assumes that all the ice and snow is gone before the end of summer 😉 🙂

[bartian]

Ice? Snow? It’s been almost 30C here the past few days!
My biggest concern with keeping fish outside is how to prevent them from overheating, while keeping them warm. It might be too cold in the shadow, but it will certainly get too hot in direct sunlight.

I don’t know how the climate is where you live, but our Dutch weather changes it’s mind every few moments. It might be a nice temperature today, but tomorrow night it could be freezing, so to speak. Even in mid-summer, the temperature swings like it’s drunk.

A fish of tropical origin will probably dislike such changes. Paros don’t need high temperature (I don’t use heaters), but I think they like it to be constant.

You could give it a try, however, if you have sufficient numbers of fish.

[Michael Kotzulla]

I’m planning to provide not my paros but my Betta edithae with such “summer-resort”, too.

So up to now I placed a 250-litres tank in a half-shadowy place in our garden (not on teh ground but on a shelf) and started to fill it with fresh and used r/o-water (as I do not trust the rainwater I get from our roofs). As I have no car, this goes rather slowly.

Once there are about 15 to 20cm of water in the tank (= 75-100 litres), I’m going to add local marsh and water plants – and finally the fish. (In first place, I planned to do this with some Elassoma, but they are much to expensive for such a test and to small to observe them in such tank anyway. So now that I have the pretty strong Betta edithae swimming, this will be my “guniea pig”)

My concernes so far:
overheating during day + undercooling over night
– Solution so far: semi-shadowy place; tank covered; plenty of plants providing additional shadow
extreme evaporation without proper refill (in time of longer absence, i.e. vacation)
– Solution so far: tank covered with the standard cover, but leaving a vent for air circulation and for food to get in
leck of food (?) (in time of longer absence, i.e. vacation)
– no solution so far: As I don’t want to keep the tank uncovered, there might be too few insects finding the inlet. But actually, healthy adult fish should be able to easily live with such diet.

Now I would like to measure the maximum (and minimum) temperature during a 24-hour cycle. As there are cheap thermometers available that save the maximum level reached, this would be a good indication, whether or not additional shadow is needed.
Regarding the minimum teperature, I’m not as concerned: As it should not drop lower than 10 or 15°C (at least not for a longer period), this should be okay at least for my fish.

I guess, a good way to prevent at least overheating is to keep fish in half-buried barrels or basins with plenty of water lillies etc. covering the water surface. This seems to work pretty well with larger labyrinth fish such as Macropodus, Trichgaster or Trichpodis sepcies.

Anyway: I’m pretty interested in any field report, too! 🙂

[Bill Little]

Interesting discussion … different places, different situations. I am in the process of putting out a container or two for the summer. However, my temperatures will reach 32 – 35C in the heat of the day. I can place Elassoma in the containers. They are virtually free if collected from the local ponds in the area. On the other hand, my Betta edithae are expensive as I must purchase them on the internet and pay for shipping. If I am successful with fry in the coming months I may try placing a few of them in the outside container. I believe their early growth would be much improved being outside and be able to feed continuely.

[Marcin Chyla]

Hello Everybody, to be honest I also wondering about keeping my paros outside during summer period. In my 100L ( 1m long) outside the house tank was plenty of any kind of microorganisms – what if I placed there one or two pairs of paros..) I think I will take a risk in this or next summer period. I can imagine how fast will fry grow when 24h/day something is swimming around they mouth ..:) Aquarium is placed under some wood roof and it will be covered by some net. Small insects can fly thru this net (mosquitoes) but bigger cannot (dragonfly..)

Greetings!
Marcin Chyła
http://www.ekologicznerozwiazania.pl

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