How did fish get in natural ponds and lakes?

Answer 1

At one time these ponds and lakes were connected to other bodies of water. Streams, rivers, and eventually the ocean. Fish entered the lake area while it was still connected. Through environmental change these lakes and ponds became split from the other water bodies and so the fish were trapped there.

Answer 2

Several methods.
1. Stocking. People put them there.
2. Some kinds of fish can crawl overland. Most don't, though.
3. If the pond or lake is connected to other bodies of water, well... fish swim.
4. Just because a pond or lake isn't connected now doesn't mean it wasn't in the past. The end of the last ice age put a lot of water in a lot of places. A "storm of the millenium" may have flooded areas, connecting ponds and lakes. The water later subsided, leaving fish in isolated places.
5. Sometimes birds can carry fish eggs or even a live fish, with the beak or feet. It's unlikely... but given a long enough time, the unlikely will happen.
6. Waterspouts. Unlikely, but it does happen. A tornado picks up water from one body of water along with fish, and some of the fish drop out, still living, miles away.

Answer 3

Most natural lakes are formed by the shape of the land and rivers that fill them up. Many fish live, spawn, and travel in rivers. Many fresh water fish have ended up in lakes and thrived in there. Most of the fish in lakes today are ancestors of the original fish who, by chance, found themselves in a lake.

Ponds may form naturally but many dry up during certain times of the year depending on local climates. Some fish may have entered ponds in a way much like lakes,but thru creeks. Some fish can even lay eggs then die when the water dries up. When the rainy season comes back, the eggs hatch and a new generation is born.

Answer 4

Well, God put them there...ergo, meaning they fell out of the sky.

Many years ago when water covered the land, after the fish evolved in the first place, they swam to various places. They still get around in the rivers and streams. There are very few bodies of water that don't have inlets and outlets. Without a water source, the pond will dry up. Many ponds are fed by small streams that originate in the higher elevations. Fish can swim upstream as far as they like to find a place to reside.

Answer 5

Waterfowl like ducks and geese can transport fish eggs and fish fry to remote fish-less waters.
I had a neighbor who put in a pond where no water had ever been and within the first year we both noticed small fish in the water.
The ONLY way they could have gotten there was by the waterfowl who frequented his pond from the beginning.
This has also been documented by the DEC.

This is what Charles Darwin noted:
When ducks suddenly emerge from a pond covered with duck-weed, I have twice seen these little plants adhering to their backs; and it has happened to me, in removing a little duck-weed from one aquarium to another, that I have unintentionally stocked the one with fresh-water shells from the other. But another agency is perhaps more effectual: I suspended the feet of a duck in an aquarium, where many ova of fresh-water shells were hatching; and I found that numbers of the extremely minute and just-hatched shells crawled on the feet, and clung to them so firmly that when taken out of the water they could not be jarred off, though at a somewhat more advanced age they would voluntarily drop off. These just-hatched mollusks, though aquatic in their nature, survived on the duck's feet, in damp air, from twelve to twenty hours; and in this length of time a duck or heron might fly at least six or seven hundred miles, and if blown across the sea to an oceanic island, or to any other distant point, would be sure to alight on a pool or rivulet."
So fish's eggs could potentially get stuck to birds who have recently visited one lake and be deposited in the next.

Answer 6

Either the pond/lake was "stocked" with live fish by someone hoping to make it a good fishing spot, or else the fish were there long before the humans were!

Answer 7

All rivers communicate with oceans, fish came from the ocean to the rivers. Other way is that people put some fish on a lake or pond and they reproduce

Answer 8

Good question. At one point, much of what is dry land today was covered with water. North America, for example, was a narrow ridge of land surrounding what is now referred to as the Inland Sea. As water levels dropped, and as the land rose up from the sea, ponds and lakes were formed, where the water was trapped. These ponds and lakes were once all filled with sea water, and with sea creatures. As the water in these ponds and lakes gradually found ways to drain out to the sea, it was replaced by rainwater (fresh water) and drainage from other fresh-water sources, such as rivers and springs. Some of the sea creatures trapped in these inland lakes and ponds were able to evolve gradually, and accustom themselves to fresh water. They survived. Others were not able to make the transition, and they did not survive. That's why most fresh-water fish have salt-water 'cousins' -- fish that they resemble in almost every way, except that one lives in fresh water and one lives in salt water.
An interesting example of a fish that did not remain in its fresh-water, inland pond or lake, is the salmon. It is born in fresh water, at the headwaters or very shallow spawning grounds near the headwaters, and remains there for the first year of its life. Then the fingerlings follow some instinctive call to salt water, make their way down the rivers and streams until the reach the ocean. They remain there for two or three years, until they are full adults, ready to breed. At that time, they re-enter the rivers and streams and make their way back to the same hatching area where they were born, lay their eggs and sperm there, and die. Their life cycle is complete.
Today, some unscrupulous people 'plant' fish in natural ponds and lakes, and these foreign imports are wiping out the natural species that inhabit these areas, and in many cases, wiping out other co-dependent species as well.
Nature, left in balance, is an amazing force, but when people tamper with it, for whatever reason, they usually end up throwing something out of kilter! I guess we aren't as smart as we think.....

Answer 9

If there isn't any water-way connection to the lake, the main elementary technique is fish eggs caught to the legs of aquatic birds. There eggs can stand some drying, some can bypass dormant for years. That brings up yet another technique: A pond/lake refills in the time of a moist season & the eggs hatch. this occurs in desolate tract factors of North u . s . and Africa.

Answer 10

from streams that flow to and from the ocean.

Only man made ponds and lakes dont have an externall water source

Natural ponds and lakes come from natural rivers and so forth that run to the ocean either underground or above