Höchstadt (dpa / lby) – The weeks of drought are also causing problems for the carp pond owners. “The first ponds had to be fished out because the fish lacked water,” said the deputy head of the branch office for carp pond farming at the Bavarian State Institute for Agriculture, Tobias Küblböck, in Höchstadt.
The focus of carp farming in Bavaria is in Franconia and the Upper Palatinate, where around 5,500 pond farmers produce around 6,000 tons of carp every year. According to Küblböck, the ponds there are usually fed by precipitation and surface water. After the heavy rain in winter and spring, these were actually well filled, said Küblböck.
“In the last few weeks it has hardly rained, and if so only locally,” said the expert. That is not enough to compensate for the amount of water that is currently evaporating. It can be assumed that the water level will drop by about one centimeter per day in the heat.
First and foremost, the drought means stress for the pond owner. “Basically, carp like warm water temperatures,” says Küblböck. Because of the heat alone, major failures are not to be expected.
But it becomes problematic when the oxygen content in the water drops. Pond owners could then set up fans in the ponds or, in the worst case, would have to take the fish out of the pond and move them. This is often difficult from an organizational point of view, because the other ponds are usually already stocked with fish, explained Küblböck.
The Erlangen pond host Peter Oberle recently had to fish out one of his ponds because the water level had dropped by 60 centimetres. “It hasn’t rained since April,” he says. “Because it was so shallow, the herons, which have long legs, could hunt the small carp relatively easily. If we hadn’t caught them, we would have suffered a total loss.”
