| ▲ | m463 3 days ago |
| > That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes isn't that a common question? "How do fish appear in landlocked lakes/ponds/etc"? After digging a pond and letting it fill with rainwater/groundwater, fish appear. I don't think its because people carried them there. (don't really know the common answer though) |
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| ▲ | giancarlostoro an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| Birds can drop fish after they've captured them. Not longer than a year now, we were visiting my wife's family, and me and my father in law got to Walmart there was a dead fish in the front, but when we mentioned it to my wife who got there before us (separate cars) she said it was struggling for life when they saw it, I don't think there was a lake nearby enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if birds have accidentally introduced life into new bodies of water. |
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| ▲ | iefbr14 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Fish eggs often travel long distances by sticking to the feathers or legs of waterfowl I have been told at school long ago. |
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| ▲ | giancarlostoro an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Close, I looked it up out of curiosity, it seems Waterfowl eat the eggs, but they travel through their digestive system fully alive. Really interesting even so! | | | |
| ▲ | hnlmorg 34 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’ve wondered if natural phenomena like tornadoes could carry fish eggs those kinds of distances. Or even just carry the eggs into the clouds, to be rained down large distances away. |
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| ▲ | stevenwoo 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In this case they have carbon dated wooden equipment for fish farming and know due to geological factors when the lake could support fish, though of course the fish might have gotten there first somehow. I thought this was interesting because it predates agriculture in the same area. |
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| ▲ | soperj 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | How did wooden equipment not whither away in 7000 years? | |
| ▲ | Kye 25 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Humans were shaping their environments to produce food long before they plowed fields. Hunter-gatherers didn't just hunt and gather willy-nilly, picking up whatever they found, oblivious to how it got there. |
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| ▲ | wil421 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Mountain lakes are completely different. There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places. |
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| ▲ | jjallen 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This doesn't provide an answer for lakes. But I always thought the explanation was eggs randomly getting stuck to bird feet. Or maybe a bird carries a fish with eggs up there and eats it or something. Inevitably it happens though... | | |
| ▲ | wil421 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Lakes have connected rivers and streams that provide paths for fish and eggs to move around. There are human and animal activities that affect this. Your bird example and beavers causing floods could allow movement. | | |
| ▲ | jmalicki an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Isolated alpine lakes do not have connected rivers and streams, yet a ton are stocked with fish by humans. Is it unbelievable that ancient hunter-gatherers would do the same thing? | | |
| ▲ | jerf 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | A lot of people are unaware of how much husbandry hunter-gatherers still did. They may not have been farmers, with field plantings, weeding, and harvest seasons designed to maximize every acre under production, but they weren't stupid and still spent time to bend the world around them to the task of providing them more resources than it would have on its own. On a bang-for-the-buck basis they often did better than the farmers, it's just that without farming you can't get that density and net return. This looks like a good overview paper for interested folk: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3048989/ |
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| ▲ | jjallen 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | So many lakes do not have rivers flowing in and out. A low spot in an area will become a lake. Many do have rivers; many don't. Ponds even more so don't have attached rivers. |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | darknavi an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | "Life finds a way" - Dr. Ian Malcolm |
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| ▲ | williamdclt 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How did they appear upstream? | | |
| ▲ | wil421 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There’s a stream in my back yard that doesn’t hold fish over the winter because it’s too shallow/cold. A large property near me has a pond that overflows into my stream. The fish survive in the deeper waters of the pond and spring rain usually washes fish eggs or even fish into my stream. They gather in the rocks in my backyard near the storm drain. Alpine lakes are fed by snow met. There’s not going to be fish eggs on the snowpack that melts into the lake. | | |
| ▲ | kakacik an hour ago | parent [-] | | You yourself wrote in this thread: > There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places. Do you realize that in the summer mountains below 4000m are mostly snow-free and thawing point ie in Europe has been pushed above 5000m repeatedly during summers. Its easy to have 25C in 2500m in today's alps (ie today 22C in 2000m in Chamonix, France). The term 'alpine lake' doesn't mean anything specific, and most are fed from rain during entire summer without any/much of snow or ice contribution. |
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| ▲ | ShinyLeftPad an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | A tornado? |
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| ▲ | jmalicki an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In California, it's because people (the state department of fish and wildlife) put the fish there. You can even see their scheduled fish plantings online: https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FishPlants/PublicPlantSearch |
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| ▲ | sejje 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've had a pond for 11 years that has not acquired fish. It existed before that, too, but I'm not sure for how long (I think several decades). It has lots of amphibians and snakes. Rarely any birds. |
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| ▲ | profsummergig 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Maybe the snakes have been eating the fish eggs / baby fish? | | |
| ▲ | sejje 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The bullfrogs are the big carnivores, and sure, maybe. Snakes are active but I doubt they eat nearly as much as the bullfrogs. | | |
| ▲ | giancarlostoro an hour ago | parent [-] | | Apparently if you introduce a large fish species to your pond, the bullfrogs will not eat them, not sure how you would secure the eggs though. Maybe some sort of area that could shelter from them, but once they come out of shelter when they hatch, its kind of the same problem. Could also introduce fish that will eat the frogs to keep them under control. Or just leave it all as-is. |
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| ▲ | ekjhgkejhgk an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It's not the only possible explanation. Fish can get sucked up by tornatos and get dropped later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals > Tornadoes and waterspouts may lift up animals into the air and deposit them miles away. |
