Livestock

First arrivals

There are many different creatures native to freshwater in the British Isles and I felt it appropriate to try to introduce some of them. The first guests to arrive were the amphibians. A friend has both common frogs and smooth newts in his pond so he very kindly furnished me with some young metamorphosed juveniles of each and some legless frog tadpoles. I was also given some frog tadpoles of different stock by a work colleague, which can only be good from a genetic point of view. I introduced all of these at once and they seemed to settle in well. The young frogs and newts left the water almost immediately but stayed in the general location - a neighbour brought one of the frogs around and put it back in, thinking that she had accidentally acquired it at the garden centre! The tadpoles (as of 25/07/05) appear to have disappeared, though I did see some which were nearly fully metamorphosed, so I expect that they'll be hopping around the neighbours' gardens somewhere.

The main attraction

The next arrivals were fish. After all, that's what I really built the Pnod for! First to go in were four shubunkin goldfish, followed after a couple of weeks by two sarasa comets. Around this time I also acquired some plants, so the fish had some cover. After three or four weeks of feeding, I finally noticed that the fish were all coming to the surface together to feed (I'm feeding them Hikari Gold pellets) and it was heartening to see that they were all still there.