How cold Can it get and my fish live?

[Gerwin]

Well I've never taken a thermometer to the pond but a friend of mine had a shallow goldfish pond 12-18inches max depth, the top froze over one year and when it thawed the goldfish were alive. I mean, I remember looking through the iced over top, thinking how cool it was to see the goldfish sitting still! yet they all survived.
My pond is about 1200 gallons and never in 11 years have done anything for the winter and never lost a fish.
Now I must add, I do live in south Ms. and rarely do we get nights lower than about 25 and that is rare, but still all live.
So unless we are talking about 100-200 gallon above ground ponds, heating is not a big factor.
I might add alot of folks down south put a plecostomus in their pond for algae control, they will NOT survive the winter! As well a other tropical fish, they must be removed for the fall.

[jmaxie1977]

I bought 20 of the plecs when petsmart had them for $1 last summer. When it got close to winter I brought the 15 that survived in and spread them between 3 tanks. A month or so later while checking out the filters I noticed movement on the bottom of my pond. Come to find out I missed one of the little suckers, I wasnt about to try to drain the pond again to save 1 little algae eater so I left him and didnt think to much more about it. About a month later I see him again hanging around the pump. Believe it or not he is still alive. Out of the 15 I brought in only 3 are still alive. Keep in mind that our winter was more like fall last year and I dont think I will get that lucky again. Im in the process of building a second smaller pond in my greenhouse to overwinter him and my much larger one in.

[Redfish]

When I was young and my dad was stationed in Japan, I went and stayed a few nights at out maids house. The $$ was strong back then in Japan, everyone had a maid. Land is a premium over there, most people lived in apartment buildings, these buildings weren't heated and it gets cold in Japan. Everyone used space heaters and those were turned off at night, the Futons, a Japanese bed were kinda like a American electric blanket and that's how you stayed warm at night. The point of this story, most people, because of space, didn't have dogs, everyone had goldfish tanks or beetles,that's right, beetles as pets, but that's another story. It would get so cold in these apartments that the top layer of water in the tanks would freeze solid every night and the goldfish did just fine. I remember as a kid when I saw this I was just amazed that the fish could live thru this. Now about the beetles