~ mostly about Nature and not running

I was so proud of myself this morning.  Exercised the dogs (40 min jog with #1, 20 min walk with #2), lifted a bit (squats, deadlifts, and pistol squats), and did minor yardwork all before 9:00 am.  Score!

And then, right then, a delivery!  To sum up koi pond filtration, at least the mechanical stage, the dirty water goes through some sort of sieve-like apparatus, leaving the chunks behind.  My old filter media was a mesh bag full of sponge-like blocks, but it did not do the trick well enough.  My new media is sheets of coiled plastic strings that vaguely look like uncooked ramen noodles.  This can be cut to tightly fit the filter tank or whatever, which I did.  In the meantime, I noticed a small toad trapped in the old filter bag. 

Basically, Nature's Bounty: loads of toad explicit action: free koi food.  I've known for a while that there were tadpoles in the mesh bag, but I'd assumed (ok, hoped) that they'd wriggle out on their own.  Well, apparently, somebody made it to terrestrial maturity in there.  This surprised me because I've tried and failed to rear toads and frogs several times as a kid and once as a youth counselor (pro tip: don't buy Uncle Milton Planet Frog, just don't, but read the Amazon reviews if you don't believe me and/or have a hankering for mild depression), but I finally managed to pull it off in a scummy filter bag without lifting a finger.  I opened the bag and tried to grab the little toad, but it hopped in between some of the sponges.  It was about pea-sized.  I didn't know that toads could be that small!

I also don't know why I'd thought there would be only one.

So, once I cut and installed my new filter pads, I upended the bag on the patio.  Heaps of toads, dozens of them.  Some tadpoles too, but mainly toads.  I had the puppy outside with me then, and she went nuts while these tiny things hopped around blithely.  There were so many of them that she couldn't focus on chasing one of them.  I guess a brood bomb really works.  She didn't catch any of them, although my nagging "leave it" may have checked her efforts.

I checked the blocks carefully, not wishing to leave any tadpoles out there to sizzle (high of 35 C again today).  It's really hard to pick tadpoles up from a flat surface, by the way...the easiest implement turned out to be a fork.  But I took my time and all of the tadpoles went back into the pond because of the sanctity of life and free koi food and whatnot. 

The thing is, I have a second similar filter bag in the upper tank of the filtration system (the first level is mechanical, the second is chemical, nitrification, blah, blah, koi crap a lot).  This bag, unlike the other, is completely underwater, and so I wasn't expecting (ok, I was hoping not) to find any toads in there, just tadpoles.  I felt horrible about the prospect of some little toad trapped in there.

Fortunately, I found no toads, just more tadpoles.

By the time I was done, it was almost 11.  So much for that essay I was going to complete this morning.  Instead, as you see, I've wasted even more time writing about these tadpoles.

I also have a new problem: the bottom filtration tank with the new filter pads still has tadpoles in it, hundreds of them.  The bottom drain runs up into this tank so there's no point in taking them out: more of them are just going to go in.   Some tadpoles have already wriggled through the stack to the surface, which made me question the filtration power of this new media, until I realized that koi poo does not wriggle through anything.  At any rate, the bigger guys might not make it through so I guess I should remove the pads and check every week or so.

This affair has prompted an anagnorisis: I remember, way back in the day, going down to a pond or lake, ineptly flailing about with a net until I caught a half-dozen or so victims, setting up a tank or basin, laboriously changing the water, etc, for naught, not one single toad or frog, just the accumulating waxen bodies of the deceased--I was a stupid child.  I went about it backwards.  True, building this koi pond has been far more work than all of my failed amphibian ventures combined, but it's turned out to be Mecca.  I feel incredibly...potent?  Or childishly optimistic, rather.  Millions of toads!  ;)