Hello everyone, this is my first post, thought I'd say hi. I'm 34, been keeping fish since I was 10. Mostly fresh and brackish, but have tried saltwater. My two favorite fishtank setups are African Rift Valley (Lakes Malawi and Tanganyika) cichlids, and IndoPacific brackish (scats, monos, puffers, knight gobies and bumblebee gobies), both of which I have set up right now.



I started keeping a pond 4 years ago when I finally bought a house with a backyard. I've always hated koi and goldfish, thought they are totally artifical looking. Since I lived in nearly subtropical Gulf Coast Texas, I thought I could get away with tropical fish in the pond. I started out by keeping Central American and South American cichlids - severums, green terror, and jackdempseys. As I had problems the tropical cichlids, I tried Texas cichlids. My two biggest complaints about these fish were they aren't cold hardy, and they are really shy, so hard to see.



Ultimately I gave up on the cichlid pond, grabbed my cast net and bucket, and headed down to the nearby creeks and bayous. Since then, my pond has been filled with mostly sunfish, and they do great. They survive the heat of the summer, just survived the coldest, snowiest winter Houston has had in my lifetime, and they are very gregarious, come up to the top of the pond when I come by, waiting to be fed. Plus, if I lose one, due to predation by racoons or whatever, it didn't cost me anything and I can go catch another one. Right now my pond has 4 sunfish in it (I don't know the exact species of these 4, though a freshwater angler has told me they look like bluegills to him), 9 red shiners (all male, beautiful colors), and two crayfish, all wildcaught by me within a 5 mile radius of my house. Oh, there is still a lone jack dempsey, actually one of the fish I put in the pond the first month I put it in the ground. He winters in my African cichlid tank, spends March through mid November in the pond.



My pond is also a favorite breeding spot for Gulf Coast toads every year, and attracts dragonflies, both brilliant iridescent blue ones and brilliant iridescent red ones, as well as green anoles.

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