Garden Ponds are a great way to enjoy your California backyard

Fish Foods, Natural And Artificial In the ordinary course of events pond fishes do not require extra food. Usually, however, a pond is called upon to support a slightly excessive fish population with the result that natural foods are exhausted. At breeding time, too, unless they receive additional food, the eggs will be eaten.

Normally, the mature pond is rich in food matter, especially if daphnae, gammarus, etc., have been allowed to breed in the shallows. Mosquito and other insect larvae, to say nothing of their eggs and the insects themselves, add to the commissariat. The eggs and young of snails and mussels and certain plants, duckweed for example, are eaten avidly. Then there are a number of aquatic worms and Rotifers (otherwise ' Wheel animal- cules ') that provide sustenance besides the infusoria already mentioned. Diatoms and desmids, minute single-celled plants, are retained by the fish's gill-rakers, and swallowed.

Few natural foods, however, are available between, say, November and March. Now a fish is not particularly interested in food during the cold months, it is sleepy and inactive. Moreover, nearly all its energies are confined to developing the reproductive system ready for breeding in Spring. Fat stored in the tissues is devoted to maintaining the fish at this time.

Consequently extra feeding is necessary in late Autumn to prepare the fish for the rigours of the Winter, also in early Spring, when natural foods have yet to appear, and then, of course, the fish is really hungry.

If a system of daphnae raising is used, the problem of extra feeding is simplified. Still, a fish, especially in an aquarium, likes variety ; it grows faster and seems generally to be in better health on a mixed diet.

It may be, though, that a supply of natural food is not available and in this case the aquarist must fall back on artificial foods, and one cannot go far wrong if one or other of the foods advertised by reliable firms is used. They are sold usually in packets and in three grades according to the size of the fish. The medium grade, however, is suitable for most fishes. As for the material of which the packet foods consists, its name is legion ; meat meal, dried daphnae, dried flies, shrimp meat, crushed biscuit, egg powder, dried greenstuff (usually spinach), dried larval molluscs-many of these ingredients being contained in the one packet. Dried daphnae can be bought separately, the fishes seem to like it, but for some reason do not become very fat if fed on it alone. An occasional feed of packet food, in an established pond, is usually sufficient.

The aquarium, however, is devoid of many natural foods and so the fish must be fed fairly frequently.