Almost Frozen Pond

The past several nights very cold temperatures have taken over and you can see some of the ice that formed last night. The water temperature this morning was 38 degrees which is down from 55 degrees last week. This week I had to remove the the last of our Water Hyacinths which provide great coverage and protection for the fish. The Water Hyacinths had finally turned almost black from the cold and were starting to deteriate. I decided to use some stryofoam pieces to make some floating structures to replace that protection offered by the plants. They are pretty ugly and jury is still out on how well they will work. But the fish seemed so exposed and I thought they would be easily seen by the various predators that visit the pond. This morning the temperature dropped to 18 degrees and the tadpole pond was completely frozen over with ice a half inch thick. If they are like fish, there must be an air hole to allow gasses to excape so I broke the ice into chunks. I hope the shock wave caused by breaking the ice didn't cause the tadpoles any discomfort.