Best way is to net a few, look at it, do a web search and compare to pictures. You could try taking some good photos and posting them.

hi
Certainly wouldn't rule out GF. I refilled my pond after some repairs on April 23 and have at least a dozen babies pushing 3 inches already!! I thought at first they were minnows then dragonfly nymphs. They are now up scrambling for food with the adults now so no doubt about the idenity.lol Most were dark but several are now showing orange and can already see fin types. Amazed at the rate of growth. Not sure about Koi but I'd bet it's just as fast?? gary

I wish they were baby goldfish! I've managed to feed a few of those to the herons and keep having to buy more but my GF are the 27 cent ones from PetSmart so I'm doubting they are old enough to mate--and some of these minnows are fairly big--over an inch--while some are maybe 3/4". Just scared of an overpopulation of Gambusia nipping at my koi and GF and over-populating.

Gambusia is a family name for guppies. The family also includes Mosquito fish. They start out about the size of an eyelash from eggs. They will not bother the other fish. They may have a population explosion but birds will take care of that, mostly. So will cold weather.

ID will take care of itself over time. An inch is about the limit for Gambusia.

I guess once you build a pond, especially the size of our's (it was a low, boggy depresion with springs and we had a friend dig it out for a pond so it is 175 feet long), the saying is true, "Build it and they will come." There have been plenty of water snakes, the heron, egret (and we are no where near the coast), snapping turtles, plenty of frogs and tadpoles and we have bluegill bream the size of the palm of my hand in the long end and have no idea how they got there! I am going to have to accept that nature will dictate who resides and who leaves.

{{gwi:221829}}

Feeder goldfish can and do spawn when quite small....

Post a picture and we can tell you what they are.

Gambusia look almost exactly like a female guppy with no pretty coloration at all.

If I can catch one, I'll try to get a pix of it in profile. They are fast little boogers whatever they are! lol!

By all means, net one and take it out for a good luck. I saw something in my pond this spring that I took for a very tiny grey fry. When I got one out, I could see it was a larva of so Ime sort. Checking the internet, I identified it as the larva of a predacious diving beetle. Even the larva will attack small fish, injecting them with something that turns their insides into slurpies. I had lost 3 of my smaller fish by the time I figures this out.

Well, good albeit puzzling follow-up news. They ARE baby goldfish. However, I have all sizes and the original comets I bought this spring and summer and all were relatively the same size at purchase (from 1" in body length to maybe 1 1/2") although some were bought maybe two to three weeks apart. I have babies from teensy 1/4" to nearly an inch! I'm amazed. At this rate, I can open a fish pet shop! Also, while some are brown, some that are still quite small are already turning orange and white. So goldfish breeding is quite a mysterious process to me!

I use Rosie Reds! they are a cold hardy albino Fat hear minnow. Most pet shops have them. They live foe several years and reproduce maderatly. Much better than Gambusia.

Hi
I am having similar results but my originals all ranged from solid white to white spotted with at least 4 distict finnage variations . All of the fry from this spring were at least dark if not black. 3 weeks later there are only two black left some have begun to show white as you'd expect but not not a single solid white .
Certainly grow at an inceredible rate?? Seem to have some much smaller which I assume are yet another spawning,
The first are already showing great variation in finnage
You would think the short type would be dominate With GF
"what you see is definitely NOT what you get ?? gary

Apparently so, Gary. My original 'adult' comets are mostly all orange but the babies are a mixture of black and orange and some white (and some all brown for now). From what I read, they turn colors as they grow and often lose the black entirely. But I'm still puzzled that I have all sizes. I would have thought that if a pair or two laid eggs, I would have babies of a uniform size unless there is just mass breeding going on by various different ones of differrent stages of maturity? I don't understand goldfish 'love'.

Goldfish breed continuously throughout the summer so you will get a who spectrum of sizes of babies by September. Gambusia are livebearers. Guppies have a new batch of babies about every 30 days.

Thank you for the info! Whoda thunkit? I still think now that all small fry in there are goldfish babies. But since I had just started putting the 27 cent size in there this spring, I had no idea they would be old enough or large enough to start breeding. But since we have a heron who visits regularly, the more they breed, the better I guess. Since we have a very long pond, it will be a while before we ever reach maximum capacity.

Hi
When i first started my pond in 1981 they were wiped
out by Herons so switched to tropical fish Though the herons still caught a bunch they kept ahead . The winter of 09 set a record cold and the heating system broke down
wiping out the entire stock fearing mosquitos i replaced them with some 8 for a buck GF. Haven't lost a single GF for any reason lol. They jumped from 8 to 104 in a bit more than a year lol I guess the herons are dining in better places now?? lol Ponding is always a continuous source of learning !! gary

You are fortunate you can have tropical's outdoors. I am happy with my goldies and koi (especially since the larger ones were given to us) and happy to have them breeding. I must also say we somehow got bluegill bream in the long end (we have an upper circle with a fountain and waterfall which feeds into the long end and all is creek-fed from springs on our farm. The long end does drain back into the creek in a trickle about four feet long so it would have been impossible for them to swim up that incline. Either birds dropped them or ??. Anyway, they also seem to have now two or three small ones I assume they spawned. The large area of parrots feather in the long end have several babies of some distraction swimming among their fronds, again, I assume baby goldies although it could be a mixture of bream fry and goldfish. Amazing to me! And there are also tons of teensy, bright white dots which I'm wondering whether those are eggs?!

Hi
Well it's a mixed bag on keeping tropicals in a pond For one thing most FW fish are designed to be hidden from the top and bottom so the pretty part is on the sides. Look fantastic in Aquaria while rather blah in ponds .
second is the temp needs even in s. florida it gets too cold though it can take years to do so. Many types stick to the bottom so you never see them lol
i had always worried about GF here due to the constant heat but doesn't seem to be a problem
My runaway biggest problem over the years has been predation . Everything from Herons to raccoons turtles crayfish to small boys Over the last 3 years none of these have been a problem. Can already see the big problem is going to be over population lol Where are the darn predators when you need them?? lol gary

Isn't that ironic that now you are worried about the lack of predation?! In addition to the water lilies and parrots feather, I need to figure out ways to provide cover for the fish in the long end of the pond. That's where the herons snatch up my fish. But, at the rate they are breeding, maybe I won't lose them all.

I'd be curious how the bluegills got in there too, since they are nest builders and the eggs and small fry depend on paternal care. If the aforementioned small boys have access to your pond, you may have had a "guerrilla stocking."

Brings to mind when I was a kid in upstate NY. The village needed to drain the reservoir for maintenance. The authorities including the state conservation department (DEC) were convinced there could be no large fish in there, since the watershed included only tiny semi-seasonal streams. Generations of locals who had (illegally) fished there knew otherwise, and convinced the DEC to bring an electro-shock boat to capture and relocate the fish. There were surprised (but we weren't) to find huge bass, pickerel, catfish, etc. No carp, though!

Nope, no small boys and my son, 20, didn't do it. There were three palm sized bluegill's and now there are two small ones who tag along with them. It's a mystery how the larger ones got in there. But there have also been small snapping turtles (who, of course, can walk from the nearby creek) so I suppose 'built it and they will come'.