How thick does ice get in SE Nebraska?

[Ponder]

What is the average thickness of ice around Lincoln, Nebraska. What is the minimum depth a pond needs to be for fish to survive through the winter in SE Nebraska?

Thank you so for your responses.

[Shorty]

It can vary, last winter the ice was 11-15" at the area lakes around Lincoln, the previous 6-7 years we were lucky to have a two week ice fishing season with 5-6" max. ice thickness. If I were to have a pond I would want at least a 12ft minimum depth going into winter.

Welcome aboard Ponder!

[Sticksnskullsia]

Depth of Ice isn't as important as snow cover on the ice. The less light that gets through to the water, the less oxygen is produced. You don't want the snow covering the ice too long. I know of lakes that are 6 ft deep and fish survive in them year round.

[Aquaman]

Two good answers above...

Yes, last year we saw ice to nearly 16 inches on a few ponds, which, when covered with ice can cause rooted vegetation to respire and/or die, which causes a serious oxygen deficit. Many of the local ponds had fish kills. The best way to prevent this is to have healthy, diverse communities of rooted plants and find some way to keep at least 10% of the pond free of long-term snow cover. That way the existing plants will provide oxygen for the fish all winter.

Having a certain depth of water in your pond is a general guideline, and not a specific number that you must achieve. Deeper water generally means more water volume, which means that you can essentially have more oxygen in storage for respiration events, but no matter how deep your pond is, if everything goes dark for a month your plants are going to die and you are going to have some sort of stress to your fish.

Remeber also that cold water has much better capacity to hold dissolved oxygen than warm water does, so if your plants are photosynthesizing and you have decent water volume fish will do fine.

Another factor to consider is that shallow ponds are often that way because of long term accumulated sediment. This means more nutrients available for plant growth. The consequence of this is that you enter winter with more total live plant mass per unit water. This is just fine when there's light--but can be very dangerous when it's dark. Ponds with tons of single-celled algae (strong green color) will show much higher daily amplitude in a DO profile. This wildly fluctuation environment means danger for fish.

[bigjigs]

I seen that if there is not enough light reaching the water you can have a winter kill b/c of decreased photosynthesis. I was wondering if this could be prevented with, instead of an aerator, use a HO underwater light during winter, or would the light not reach enough of the water in the lake?

[Shorty]

An HO light would really need to be 400 watts of better to make any difference under the ice, even then it would only help in a very small area next to the light. The intensity of artificial light needed for photosynthesis decreases exponentially as you move away from the light source, even with a 1000 watt HO light source your effective range for photosynthesis to occur is going to limited to a measly 6-8ft. Using a snowblower to remove snow in strips to allow light in during the day would be a much more effective means of preventing winter kill.