The naturalists club is monitoring Cools Pond on behalf of RDNO. “The one benefit of them is they do provide food for herons,” says Sellers. The only viable option to remove goldfish from places like Cools Pond would be to trap them or catch them with a scoop net. There is an effort to have pet stores take back goldfish or any other fish they sell. Sellers encourages people not to dump goldfish into local waterways. Otter Lake in Spallumcheen also had a winter kill, with hundreds of carp dying. So we are going to monitor it to see if there are any more,” says Sellers. There has been a pretty extensive winter kill everywhere in B.C. “We are not sure if the ones in (Cools Pond) all died off. They can also feast on the eggs of spadefoot toads, which are an endangered species in the area. They are related to carp, so they can do a lot of damage to vegetation by rooting in the soil, and they can eat the eggs of things like frogs and salamanders,” says Sellers. I know there are goldfish in the McKay Reservoir which have grown very large – up to a foot long in some cases. “Without the restraint of an aquarium, they can grow quite large.
“When people get tired of their goldfish pets, they don't want to kill them, so they look for some place to dump them, and most of our ponds have goldfish in them.”Īs goldfish are an introduced species, they can cause damage to the ecosystem. “It's a pretty widespread problem everywhere,” says Sellers. Goldfish have become common in bodies of water not only only in the Okanagan, but throughout North America. Shallow bodies of water like Cools Pond can experience what is known as a winter kill, which is caused by low levels of oxygen. There are not supposed to be any fish in the pond, let alone goldfish, says the co-chair of the North Okanagan Naturalists Club.
Some were concerned about what killed the fish, but Harold Sellers is more concerned the fish were there in the first place. Social media was abuzz this week about dead gold fish in Cools Pond in the BX. A kill-off of goldfish in a Vernon pond has the local naturalists club wondering where the invasive fish came from.
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