No matter the hobby, profession or trade, a specialized argot or jargon develops. Either it is made up by the practitioners
of the vocation or passed down through generations of past practitioners.
The pond business has it’s own vocabulary. We have words we have made up, words we have stolen from other businesses, initials that mean something just to us, or words we need to express a common idea to others. Often we forget that everyone doesn’t know the meaning of the words we toss around casually. So we use them and you, the newbie to pond building or keeping have no idea what we are talking about.
Although I know the following list is not inclusive, I have tried to explain the words we use so all of you can understand in case I, or anyone else, uses one without thinking.
I have intentionally omitted the specialized vocabulary of the koi keeper and the diseases and treatments goldfish. They are so very specialized and better left to the fish vet or fish store owner.
Words you will run into:
Air stones - A little square piece of porous material, usually glued together sand, driven by an air pump, used to provide supplemental air in a water garden, pond, or aquarium. They send bubbles into the water. These are seen more in koi ponds than water gardens with goldfish.
Algaecide - A chemical used to kill algae in a pond. Any word with ‘cide' in it means kill.
Ammonia - NH3 is the primary waste product produced by fish. Ammonia is excreted from the gills as a very dilute form of urine. Ammonia is extremely toxic to fish.
Barley straw - usually sold by the bale - about the size of a brick and used as a natural method to control the growth of blanketweed or string algae by releasing hydrogen peroxide as it decomposes.
Biofilter - see filtration
Bio-balls - spiky plastic balls made of polyethylene, used for growing beneficial bacterial in filters because they offer so much surface area for the bacteria to grow on.
Blanketweed - see string algae - an algae that look like angel hair spaghetti. They collect in a pond; we don’t like the way they look and drive ourselves crazy trying to rid the pond of them.
Chloramine - a chemical, recently introduced into city water supplies to disinfect it. Chloramine is a poison and is extremely toxic to fish. (And we drink that water?) Pond water containing any animal life (frogs, turtles, fish), must be treated to remove chloramine. Dechlorinator alone will not treat for chloramine.
Chlorine - a chemical used to kill bacteria in municipal water supplies. Chlorine is a poison. Pond or water garden water containing plants or fish must be treated to remove chlorine.
Dechlorinator - commonly called dechlor - commercial preparations used to remove chlorine and usually chloramine from the water. Used to make the pond water safe for plants and fish.
Filter media - a polyester based material placed inside a pond filter chamber for the adhesion of nitrifying bacteria.
Filtration - ponds may need filters. Some filters only remove suspended particulate matter from the pond. Others are biofilters that work by allowing a colony of bacteria to grow and remove both particulate matter and organic matter from the pond.
Fry - newly hatched fish.
Koi pond - deeper than a goldfish pond, with sophisticated filtration systems and normally no plants. Care for it like a huge outdoor aquarium.
GPH - Gallons per hour. This measures the gallons a pump pumps per hour.
Hard wired - when a pond pump is wired directly into an electrical box and we can use a switch to turn it off or on. If we do not hard wire a pump, we can simply unplug it to turn it off/on.
Liner - used to keep the water in the pond, or in our case, below sea level, to keep the ground water out of the pond. Liners are usually rubber called EPDM. When you smell it, it smells like inner tubes. There are PVC liners, cheaper, but do not last as long by far.
Nitrate - NO3 - a form of nitrogen that is the end product of the nitrification process. Nitrate can cause the lessening of the ability of fish to resist disease.
Nitrification - the process by which ammonia is changed to nitrite, and nitrite to nitrate.
Nitrite - NO2 - a form of nitrogen that is produced from ammonia during the nitrification process. Nitrite is extremely poisonous to fish.
Potassium permanganate - a medication used for treating protozoan parasites and bacterial infections of the skin and gills. Toxic in water with a high pH. Do not use with either salt for formalin.
Pumps - submersible (in the water) or inline (out of the water). We used to call them sump pumps and used them to pump the excess water out of the basement or off the flat roof. You bought them at a plumbing store. Now they are fancified, made in all configurations, had the prices inflated beyond belief and are used in our ponds.
Spawning - the reproductive process of female egg laying and male fertilization in fish.
Spitter - any piece of statuary or pot that is used to pipe water through.
String Algae - see blanketweed
U.V. light - sterilization process for algae by which the reproductive process is disrupted by the use of ultraviolet light. It will not work for blanketweed or string algae.
Water Garden - usually only about 18” deep in warmer climates, housing goldfish, normally not koi, plants. Can have filtration, but not necessarily.
Zeolite - a type of ion exchange medium use for removing ammonia from pond or water garden water.
~Jan Goldfield
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