Do your biofilter a favor -- don't overfeed your pond fish!

If you want to improve the water quality in your fish pond, you need to avoid overfeeding your fish which will reduce load on your biofilter.

This may seem like an obvious topic, but many beginning pondkeepers seem to overlook it, and the health of their ponds suffer as a result. During midsummer, a fish can easily consume 1% of its body mass in food. As the water temperature falls later in the year (in northern latitudes), this amount will drop as the fish become less active as they gear down for the winter. So they amount of food that you provide for your fish needs to be adjusted accordingly. Food eventually becomes waste product and this has to be purified using a biofilter

Guildeline to fish feeding ... beware biofilter overload

The guideline below is approximate, and based on feeding a single fish at 68 degrees F (20 degrees C). Do not take these figures as absolute in all situations, and adjust according to your own conditions.

For a 6" fish that weighs roughly 2 ounces (50 grams), feed about 1% of this weight per fish in total.

For a 12" koi that weighs about 14 ounces (400 grams), feed about 1% of this weight per fish in total.

And don't worry about your fish starving if you don't feed them every day, especially in cooler temperatures. You can easily go a week or more without feeding and your fish will be fine. At 59 degrees F (15 degrees C), you can reduce food by 1/3. At 50 degrees F (10 degrees C), you can reduce to 1/10 the normal ration of food.

So for healthy pond water and healthy fish, keep in mind the following:

• Absolutely DO NOT overfeed your fish. This will increase the load on your biofilter and lead to unhealthy water in your pond.

• It is better to feed in smaller amounts than one large serving

• Remove any uneaten food before it sinks below the surface of the water

• To really help your biofilter it is best to feed little and often ... and your pond fish will prefer this method too

If you have a mixture of large and smaller fish, a good idea is to grind the food into smaller particles before feeding. This will all the smaller fish to eat before the larger food particles are gobbled up by the bigger fish.

Again, the most important reason to restrict the amount of food given to your fish relates to the health of your biofilter and the quality of your pond water. A biofilter that's overloaded will quickly lead to a very dangerous situation for the fish living in your pond.

It is especially important that the pond pump runs during feeding time so that bacteria in the biofilter can do their job of reducing the waste ammonia products formed

Pond pumps

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