alt Hacker News> That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes
isn't that a common question?
"How do fish appear in landlocked lakes/ponds/etc"?
After digging a pond and letting it fill with rainwater/groundwater, fish appear. I don't think its because people carried them there.
(don't really know the common answer though)
Replies
Fish eggs often travel long distances by sticking to the feathers or legs of waterfowl I have been told at school long ago.
In this case they have carbon dated wooden equipment for fish farming and know due to geological factors when the lake could support fish, though of course the fish might have gotten there first somehow. I thought this was interesting because it predates agriculture in the same area.
Mountain lakes are completely different.
There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places.
In California, it's because people (the state department of fish and wildlife) put the fish there.
You can even see their scheduled fish plantings online:
I've had a pond for 11 years that has not acquired fish. It existed before that, too, but I'm not sure for how long (I think several decades).
It has lots of amphibians and snakes. Rarely any birds.
or they havent always been land locked
As well as the other answer I think aquatic birds will occasionally get fish eggs stuck to them and scatter them about.
Before we developed a taste for fish, marine life was far more abundant, particularly in rivers. There are rivers that we consider to be in good health today that have a fraction of the original species. For example, the Thames in London was once full of eels, nowadays an eel in the Thames poses a mystery as to 'how it got there'.
By full, that means not being able to see the bottom of the river due to the amount of eels present.
We ate them all.
The eels made it all the way to the Sargasso Sea and back, for breeding purposes. Clearly they would not be able to get from the sea to a fully landlocked lake, with no route to the sea.
However, my point is that we had so much marine life before we cleared out the rivers, to then need the sea, to go from coastal waters to the depths of the Antarctic ocean in the quest for any fish that have survived previous quests. It is just hard for us to imagine the abundance there once was, and, therefore, the relative ease to populate an isolated alpine meadow lake with fish in former times.
It's not the only possible explanation. Fish can get sucked up by tornatos and get dropped later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals
> Tornadoes and waterspouts may lift up animals into the air and deposit them miles away.
Birds can drop fish after they've captured them. Not longer than a year now, we were visiting my wife's family, and me and my father in law got to Walmart there was a dead fish in the front, but when we mentioned it to my wife who got there before us (separate cars) she said it was struggling for life when they saw it, I don't think there was a lake nearby enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if birds have accidentally introduced life into new bodies of water.