Koi Pron

Hmm. So here we are, almost exactly two years after my last post, and the fish are at it once again. (For reasons unstated here I did not chronicle their shenanigans of last year.)

This morning I awoke to the splish-splash of the koi making sexy times. For the satisfaction of your purely scientific interest:

 

They wore themselves plumb out, chasing poor Señora Foothill. This evening she's tired, and missing a couple of scales, but all in all not too much worse for the wear...

Steve and I created a little (Celtic) fish NICU in the hopes that some of the eggs stuck to the strands of all that lovely springtime string algae will eventually hatch.

So I guess you could call this Day 1 of the experiment.

Oh yeah, and I forgot to post about the destruction of the Rubbermaid tank biofilter waterfall thing and how we (and by "we" I mean Steve) replaced it with two large ceramic in-pond biofilters.

What you see above is the root structure of a jungle. That's where all the magic happens in a biofilter. It worked like a charm but we wanted to solve two problems:

1. It was ugly, that big black plastic tub.
2. Plumbing exterior to the pond is a potential point of failure and it did. A couple of times.

With the new system, if the plumbing should ever come apart at the seams, there's nowhere for the water to go but back in the pond. And the sound-deadening, Niagara Falls-like waterfall sound has been replaced with a gentle trickle which is great when you're sitting out there all calm with a glass of wine but not so great since The Loud Family rented the house directly behind us.

Oh, and we got us some new babies, too. Three butterflies. 'Cause Ghandi died in April. In this shot, Torpedo greets the new kids on the block, Lemonhead, Louise, and Creamsicle (who is hiding).