PTSD - Cause Unknown

Several years ago, whilst looking out of the living-room window, Beth (my eldest step-daughter) and myself were somewhat startled to see a heron launch off from the garden pond. For the following two or three weeks, no matter what hour I visited the pond, there were no sightings of any fish in the pond; come to think of it some frogs, which had been present the previous couple of days, were no longer in evidence. It was with a great sense of relief, and joy, that I observed the fish once again after the aforementioned interval.

So much for the fabled short memory span of goldfish; they’d managed to stay in hiding until such time as they assumed the coast was clear. Could they have been in a depressive state for all this time, a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder?

What has brought this memory to the fore is the lack of piscine sightings for the past couple of days. With the recent warmer weather, and the clarity of the water, sightings had been impossible to avoid; yesterday morning – zilch! At their usual feed time, I scattered a few floating foodsticks but, by the end of the afternoon, nothing had been touched so I netted the food out again. I caught a glimpse of one of the small fish, half hidden in the aquatic compost and pea gravel in one of the water-lily containers then, as soon as I knelt down beside the pond, it darted away. Later in the day, I caught a glimpse of one of the medium sized goldfish hiding beside one of the drainage pipes at the bottom of the pond.

Whatever has happened, I know that there are at least two fish there but, today yielded no further sightings, even of these two! One possibility is that one of the neighbourhood moggies had made a deliberate lunge for one of the piscine inhabitants; on several occasions these cats have been seen in the vicinity of the pond and, one of them, Peanuts, had recently devised a way of tilting an overhanging decoration to enable him to get a drink … strange that this feline ability to use/devise tools seems rarely, if ever, to have been recorded. This overhanging platform has now been removed!

It hardly seems likely, with present weather conditions (the lack of overly swollen rivers etc – which seems to deter them from those particular hunting grounds), that we have had a further visitor from the heronry. I live in hope that, trauma forgotten by the piscine inhabitants, I will once again be able to observe, and feed, the full glorious company. If their numbers are diminished, from whatever cause, re-stocking may be in order.

If anyone out there is aware of any research papers into “post-traumatic stress disorder” in goldfish, it would be interesting to find where they can be viewed online.