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Originally Posted by htismaqe
When I said "predation" I meant from the larger fish. We don't have an issue with birds or raccoons or anything but some of the largest koi in our pond can swallow a 2 or 3-inch baby fish whole. So when we have babies, they have to survive not only the winter, they have to survive it as the only source of food in the pond since we don't feed at all from November to March or so.
Our pond also had a raised edge. We actually have steep inclines (almost vertical all the way around) so it's nearly impossible for birds or other animals to snatch fish because there's no shallow water. Our pond is only about 1500 gallons but it's almost 4 feet deep as well.
If you have exclusively comets, they don't have big sucker mouths so once the fry grow even a little bit, they're safe from being cannibalized. Be careful because if you don't have external predators, you're going to end up overcrowded very quickly.
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That is good that you have a raised edge and no shallow water. I would be very upset if a raccoon was hunting some $100 fish. I could have built the pond larger to house koi, but they are so much more destructive than the goldfish, and my wife loves all of the varieties of plants we can have so we kept it smaller with the intent of only having goldfish.
I have no issues or worries with overcrowding because with just a few fish naturally surviving we can give the extras away. We only actually keep 15 fish or so. From this batch if we get some unique colors we may keep one or two more but that is it. The rest we intend to see if selling them will be something we can do.
Right now the pond has probably a hundred fry that are at a half inch to an inch in length. The majority of those won't survive the summer and through winter unless we bring them inside, which we may do depending on the success of the ones that actually hatched inside.