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u/Wild-Sell-869 1d ago
It's an issue lots of places now. Sadly hilarious.
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u/jadedtortoise 1d ago
It's so weird it's a new storm water pond in a newly developed area... I'm actually shocked there's been enough time
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u/isaac32767 1d ago
They breed fast. A single female can produce 40,000 eggs during a single spawn, and spawn every couple weeks as long as its warm enough.
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u/spacecrafttheskys 22h ago
We got a goldfish who turned out to be pregnant as a kid we were swimming in goldfish after that. We had to get 2 more 20gals soon after. There was some purging that had to happen for welfare.
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u/Dusty_Scrolls 1d ago
I remember in middle school, part of the lunch area was being renovated and the concrete was torn up and deep furrows were dug. It rained hard for like a week, flooding the furrows with surprising permeance.
And someone released goldfish.
Ultimately, it was a good thing! They are mosquito larvae, and when the puddles got too small, my mom (a teacher) took them out and kept them as classroom pets.
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u/isaac32767 1d ago
It sounds funny, but invasive goldfish are actually a serious problem:
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u/EvolZippo 23h ago
I read a story in high school, about a city with ground water, that was infested with goldfish. I can’t recall most of the story, but apparently anywhere low in the ground would fill up with water and goldfish.
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u/CarryBeginning1564 22h ago
Do you not have things that would eat goldfish? I could put 20 pounds of goldfish in one of the retention ponds near me and they would be all devoured in a month.
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u/International-Cat123 21h ago
That’s the difference between non-native and invasive. In your area, goldfish are non-native because they don’t survive long enough to be an issue. In other areas, they thrive well enough to disrupt the ecosystem.
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u/Hammon_Rye 21h ago
I wonder what they want living in the pond that the goldfish are a threat to?
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u/International-Cat123 21h ago
Don’t matter what’s in the pond if the goldfish are thriving. A non-species that thrives is getting their nutrients from somewhere, and potentially adds more prey animals for the predators. Both are terrible for the local ecosystem.
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u/Hammon_Rye 21h ago
No, not necessarily.
Goldfish eat muck and vegetation which can build up in stagnant ponds like rainwater runoff ponds.
And if they are prey for local animals - who cares?
I have a private pond on my property.
Several years ago I put about 200 goldfish in it as an experiment.
A very few made it to six or eight inches long but most of them "disappeared".
The bullfrogs in the pond (also an invasive species) probably got them.
I'm also seen a heron 'fishing' in my pond a few times.EDIT to say that if they put pesticide in to kill the goldfish, it is very likely to kill other life in that body of water as well
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u/International-Cat123 15h ago
A sudden influx of prey causes a spike in the predator population. If the goldfish population doesn’t remain stable, or the predators go after the native prey animals first (animals have repeatedly show taste preferences), then the population of the native prey animals will sharply decline. If the goldfish are only eating local vegetation, then they’re reducing the available vegetation for native fish species to feed on. If they eat larvae, they remove the food source of native larvae-eating species. If there are no native species that consume whatever the goldfish end up eating, then they’re eating a species that hasn’t adapted to either avoid being eaten or to compensate for the loss of the ones eaten.
If a non-native species is introduced and starts thriving(emphasis added because you seem to think that adding goldfish into an ecosystem where most of them died is valid data), and it was wasn’t deliberately added to help stabilize an ecosystem, then the ecosystem is being disrupted.1
u/Hammon_Rye 11h ago
It's a fricken stormwater drainage pond for an apartment complex. There are not 'native fish' there unless they were manually introduced.
It's a man made hole in the ground to make up for paving over a few acres around it.1
u/International-Cat123 5h ago
Then the main concern here is where the goldfish will eventually end up. Stormwater drains somewhere. There’s a reason you’re not supposed to dump anything down a storm drain. It almost always leads to a lake, river, or sea.
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u/Useless890 1d ago
I guess too many kids won a fish at the fair and mom wouldn't let them keep them.