Garden pond - two recent fatalities - any idea why?

[IDidntChoseThePondLife]

we built a lockdown wildlife pond using some water from a local pond. In that water came two fish, a newt and some assorted tadpoles. this was in June. Now end of August, the fish have both died. :(
the water has taken on a bit of a reddish tinge, and it doesn't look as healthy as it did. We haven't had much rain lately so the level is low, but I didn't want to put lots of tap water in there, I don't have a butt.
I'm not sure what to do and feel bad about the fish. should I have fed them perhaps.
The cat has been seen watching the pond very closely the last couple of days, but if she'd killed them, surely she would have fished them out of the pond!
Any help would be appreciated.

Do you have a pump into the pond?

Wildlife ponds are not supposed to have wildlife imported from elsewhere. The idea is if you build it they will come. Likely fish may have not had enough oxygen it the water isnt being circulated?

The reddish tinge could be an algae bloom, and some algae can be toxic to aquatic life.

How deep is the pond?

It sounds like a small pool if you’ve filled it from another. If it is small and there isn’t a flow of water the fish might of suffered from a lack of oxygen. They might have been put under physical stress from being moved to an environment that wasn’t as good as their previous one, though you might expect to have seen signs of infection. I wouldn’t have bothered moving the fish, they aren’t a great fish with your tadpoles/newts. You can use tap water. Just fill up a new pond or leave tap water to stand for a day or two before topping up the pond. Ponds are a great ecosystem to add to a garden so don’t feel too guilty, it’s a learning process.

In my defence we were in the midst of lockdown and starved of stimulation, so we snaffled a small amount of water from a local wildlife garden for 3 tadpoles. I had no idea that there were fish in there. The pond is 55 litres and pretty small, no pump but lots of oxygenating plants. I wonder now if they were always destined to die. I just assumed that as the water came from a very similar environment they would be ok.

The way to start a wildlife pond is to fill it with rainwater, put in a couple of plants and let the wildlife come to it. Trying to import wildlife will never work, and it's bad for the other pond you took it from.

I do get that, ‘GreyGardens88‘ but we were in lockdown with nothing to do and my young daughter wanted to watch some tadpoles grow. In what was a frightening time I felt a small amount of water from a local wildlife garden wasn’t going to hurt.

This is the water - only a few tadpoles or so we thought.

MIL built a small pond in her garden (gone now because of small grandchildren). She put a small fountain on it (which circulated the water) and some plants that help oxygenate the water. A good fish store will have these.

She got some fish for the pond but the neighbour cats probably got them.... but other animals came to live in it.

The wildlife in that "pond" needs rescuing. There is nothing to eat in there, no means of getting in/out, no plant life for shelter or to create oxygen etc. Your wildlife is effectively suffocating. Put them back where you found them for goodness sake.

Pretty sure moving newts is also illegal...

Its perfectly possible to create a wildlife pond using water from the tap. You just have to leave it for a few days for the nitrogen levels to settle. We built a wildlife pond during lockdown too.

That is not my pond, that was a picture of the small sample of water we took to add some tadpoles to our pond. (picture of our pond is below hopefully).

To clarify - I bought a pond liner, and some plants in late April early May.
I filled a new 55 litre pond liner with rain water and tap water and left it for a week or so. It went green and soupy and then cleared.
Then I went to our local wildlife garden pond and removed some tadpoles along with some water and to put in our pond - the photo shows some weed and 3 tadpoles.
I did not know there was anything other than tadpoles in it.
We introduced them into our pond and they seemed to be doing well.
It was only after some time that we saw some other critters moving around in the water and we identified two little fish and what a friend told me was a newt.
The tadpoles have grown into frogs and moved to our compost heap and I thought that the fish were fine as well. There were mosquito larvae, snails, and lots of other insects around the pond and they seemed to be fine when I last caught sight of them.
I check on the pond daily and saw today that both fish had died, and the water had an reddish tinge which is why I asked here.
I did not intend to have fish, and have no desire to keep any further fish, and am just looking for reasons why these have died on the same day.

I would put the surviving creatures back where you got them now, OP.

Not going to kick you when you are down. It is distressing when creatures die in your garden.

Xpost nice wee pond. It could have been chemicals. Does anyone over that fence use sprays, or do you? Could the recent rains have led to something overflowing and leaking towards the pond?

I have googled it and the red could be algae and if it is it uses up all the oxygen in the water which would explain why the fish died.
Perhaps this algae will just die if the oxygen has gone.

Ok well your pond is certainly better than your tub! I still think your fish suffocated. We bought oxygenating balls for our wildlife pond. They’re not the same as a pump snd filter set up so they don’t create danger for wildlife getting sucked in. They’re just balls about the size of a tennis ball with holes in attached to cables through which air is pushed. We put them on for a couple of hours a day (our pond is big)

In my defence we were in the midst of lockdown and starved of stimulation

but we were in lockdown with nothing to do and my young daughter wanted to watch some tadpoles grow.

Seriously? Ffs. 😡

I know you didn't get them on purpose but fish aren't meant to live in wildlife ponds for this reason and also the eat the invertebrates and tadpoles you want to attract. Fish require pumps and filters etc to keep the water clear. It sounds like the red algae killed them. It's a learning curve and hopefully next year you'll have tadpoles of your own. We were too late with our lockdown pond for tadpoles too but we did get frogs magically appear so fingers crossed for next year.

You can buy a chemical that treats tap water. I just top my pond up with a hose, as long as there's more original water than what youre adding it'll be OK might go pea green again but then it'll adjust. If there's not much water in it then there won't be any convection current internally moving the water around either. Add some barely straw to keep the water algae free, although it takes a little while to start breaking down. My lockdown pond is in the sun and we've had a problem with blanket weed so some treatment for that is worth getting too. We bought a small solar fountain which gets the water moving a bit as well.

We had a death too, we had three frogs in our pond, one had managed to get out on the driveway and I found him one morning dried to a crisp.

Apart from that we've had dragonflies and butterflies, moths and bat's we've never seen before in the 10 years we've lived here not to mention the ton of different species of bugs we've attracted.

Thank you for the suggestions, I'll get some water treatment drops and fill the pond up more, and then see what happens.

We have a similar sized pond. It’s only got frogs in it and no fish. It’s better not to have fish anyway so I’d probably leave the pond as it is and it’ll sort itself out. Do you have underwater oxygenating plants in it as well? I bought some off eBay. It’s likely that the fish didn’t have enough oxygen. But the frogs and newt will be ok as they breathe air.

I've just been out there and there is a thin film on top of the water, a little like oil but without the rainbow sheen, so something must have contaminated the water. No chemicals in the garden, and no sprays in neighbour's gardens that I know of. I did find a kebab in the middle of the lawn the other morning and some plastic ivy floating in the pond (from the neighbour's garden) so think that local foxes have been in the garden and maybe dropped something in the water. I'll skim the film off of the water and fill from the tap.

Read up before you use tap water (or create a wildlife pond: the internet was available as normal during lockdown).

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tapwater+in+wildlife+pond&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-gb&client=safari

If you have living creatures in the pond still you would be better off putting the tap water into buckets and letting it stand for a few days before adding it. If you're adding it straight in then do it from a height with a hosepipe since the falling of the water will also aid oxygenation

I am doing that as we speak HasaDigaEebowai. All of my oxgenating weed is still in there and looks perky, but I think there is definitely something not right. The pond has been grand since May - green and buzzing with life, but over the last few days the water looks awful, almost rusty. I've taken my water-lily and oxygenating weed out and put in another bucket of water. Hopefully soon I can combine the two and then see what happens.
All of the tadpoles have grown up and left now, so I think those two fish were all that was left along with the snails.

We have a water butt of rain water, to that we attach a hose, with a tap at the butt end. When our pond water evaporates we fill it through the hose with the butt rainwater.
It does take a season or two for a natural pond to settle it sounds like a build up of tannin, from debris in the pond. But the pond is new so unlikely, unless you put soil in the bottom.
A suggestion might be to gather some rainwater ( lots of rain forecast for tomorrow) in a clean bucket ( or more) and replace some of the pond water.

The oil film you describe is likely a protein film.
It’s the result of no or poor filtration and waste.
The solution would be a filter and bacteria to get rid of any excess organic waste