I was sitting in the lounge on Wednesday looking out into the garden, and it was bothering me that there were three hadedas up on the edge of the pond. I have never seen them show any interest in the pond, but suddenly they were watching the fish. I went out to take a look, and came upon an unfortunate scene – one of our koi was lying dead at the bottom of the pond.

Burns, our slightly sunburnt fish, who was about 70cm long

I found it quite unsettling, as we hadn’t noticed any odd behaviour with the fish, and was worried that the other fish may be affected. I spoke to the koi guy, and he came around today, but it seems that this was an isolated incident rather than a pond or water quality issue. The rest of the fish appear to be healthy.

Between the fish dying and the koi guy giving the thumbs up I’ve been stressing about the other fish a bit, and reading up about the possible causes…..and learning about all the things which can go wrong. This may have been a case of the fish being egg bound, where the eggs are not released and not reabsorbed into the body which cause pressure on the internal organs and eventually death. Or it just died of old age.