Pond

For other uses, see Pond (disambiguation).

A pond in Swarzynice, Poland

A pond is a body of standing water, either natural or man-made, that is usually smaller than a lake. A wide variety of man-made bodies of water are classified as ponds, including water gardens, water features and koi ponds; all designed for aesthetic ornamentation as landscape or architectural features, while fish ponds are designed for commercial fish breeding, and solar ponds designed to store thermal energy.

Standing bodies of water such as puddles, ponds, and lakes are distinguished from a water course, such as a brook, creek, or stream via current speed. While currents in streams are more easily observed, ponds and lakes possess thermally driven microcurrents and moderate wind-driven currents. These features distinguish a pond from many other aquatic terrain features, such as stream pools and tide pools.

Some mills use the kinetic energy of the moving water in the pond to generate electricity.

Technical definitions

A small man-made garden pond at the Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur, India

The technical distinction between a pond and a lake has not been universally standardized. Limnologists and freshwater biologists have proposed formal definitions for pond, in part to include 'bodies of water where light penetrates to the bottom of the waterbody,' 'bodies of water shallow enough for rooted water plants to grow throughout,' and 'bodies of water which lack wave action on the shoreline.' Each of these definitions has met with resistance or disapproval, as the defining characteristics are each difficult to measure or verify. Accordingly, some organizations and researchers have settled on technical definitions of pond and lake which rely on size alone.

Even among organizations and researchers who distinguish lakes from ponds by size alone, there is no universally recognised standard for the maximum size of a pond. The international Ramsar wetland convention sets the upper limit for pond size as 8 hectares (19.768 acres), but biologists have not universally adopted this convention. Researchers for the British charity Pond Conservation have defined a pond to be 'a man-made or natural waterbody which is between 1 m² and 20,000 m² in area (2 ha or ~5 acres), which holds water for four months of the year or more.' Other European biologists have set the upper size limit at 5 ha (12.355 acres).

In practice, a body of water is called a pond or a lake on an individual basis, as conventions change from place to place and over time. In North America, even larger bodies of water have been called ponds; for example, Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts measures 61 acres (~25 ha), nearby Spot Pond is 340 acres (140 ha), while in between is Crystal Lake at 33 acres (13 ha). There are numerous examples in other states of bodies of water less than 10 acres (4.0 ha) being called lakes. As the case with Crystal Lake shows, marketing purposes may be the driving factor behind some names.

Formation

Ponds can result from a wide range of natural processes, although in many parts of the world these are now severely constrained by human activity. Any depression in the ground which collects and retains a sufficient amount of precipitation can be considered a pond, and such depressions can be formed by a variety of geological and ecological events.

Nomenclature

Formal rock garden pond with waterfall.

In origin, pond is a variant form of the word pound, meaning a confining enclosure. As straying cattle are enclosed in a pound so water is enclosed in a pond. In earlier times, ponds were man-made and utilitarian; as stew ponds, mill ponds and so on. The significance of this feature seems, in some cases, to have been lost when the word was carried abroad with emigrants. In the United States, natural pools are often called ponds. Ponds for a specific purpose keep the adjective, such as "stock pond", used for watering livestock.

Pond usually implies a quite small body of water, generally smaller than one would require a boat to cross. Another definition is that a pond is a body of water where even its deepest areas are reached by sunlight or where a human can walk across the entire body of water without being submerged. In some dialects of English, pond normally refers to small artificially created bodies of water.

Some regions of the United States define a pond as a body of water with a surface area of less than 10 acres (40,000 m²). Minnesota, known as the 'land of 10,000 lakes' is commonly said to distinguish lakes from ponds, bogs and other water features by this definition, but also says that a lake is distinguished primarily by wave action reaching the shore.

Pond in winter

Regional differences include the use of the word pond in New England, and Maine in particular, for relatively large water bodies. For example a Great Pond in Maine is considered to be at least 10 acres (41,240 m²) in area.

In areas which were covered by glaciers in the past, some ponds were created when the glaciers retreated. These ponds are known as kettle ponds, although larger occurrences are called kettle lakes or pothole lakes or simply kettle holes. Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, is a well known example of a kettle hole. Kettle ponds are often deep and clean because they are fed by underground aquifers rather than surface streams.

The term is also used for temporary accumulation of water from surface runoff (ponded water).

There are various regional names for naturally occurring ponds. In Scotland, one of the terms is lochan, which may also apply to a large body of water such as a lake.

The word "pond" is sometimes also used to refer to the Atlantic Ocean in the expression "across the pond", and the expression "big pond" similarly is sometimes used for the Pacific. These uses are deliberate idiomatic understatements.

Characteristics

During the last thirty years of his life, the main focus of Claude Monet's artistic production was a series of about 250 oil paintings depicting the lily pond in his flower garden

Some ponds have no surface outflow draining off water and ponds are often spring-fed. Hence, because of the closed environment of ponds, such small bodies of water normally develop self contained ecosystems.

Ponds' calm waters are ideal for insects and other water dwelling invertebrates. This includes the pondskater, the water boatman, the diving beetle, the whirligig beetle and the water scorpion.

Vernal ponds are ponds which dry up for part of the year. Naturally occurring vernal ponds do not usually have fish. They are called vernal ponds because they are typically at their peak depth in the spring ("vernal" means to do with the spring).

Uses

In the Indian subcontinent, Hindu temples usually have a pond nearby so that pilgrims can take baths. These ponds are considered sacred. In medieval times in Europe, it was typical for many monastery and castles (small, partly self-sufficient communities) to have fish ponds. These are still common in Europe and in East Asia (notably Japan), where koi may be kept.

Another use is in agriculture. In agriculture, treatment ponds combined with irrigation reservoirs are used as a self-purifying irrigation reservoir to allow irrigation at times of drought.

Tobha is Punjabi name for village pond. Every village in Punjab (India) essentially has a pond, into which the drainage of village is forced. Buffalos and other village animals take bath in village pond during summers. Tobha is really an object of entertainment for village people, where children also learn to swim and play.

The small pond in a(bog) or mountain is called "池塘" (chitō) in [Japan] and is discriminated from the pond in the plain and widely recognized by mountaineers.

Examples

Thousands of examples worldwide are available to illustrate the pond; a few of these are:

• Antonelli Pond, California, USA
• Big Pond, Nova Scotia
• Bullough's Pond, Massachusetts, USA
• Christian Pond, Wyoming, USA
• Hampstead Ponds, England
• Milicz Ponds, Poland
• Oguni-numa Pond, Japan
• Pete's Pond, Botswana
• Rožmberk Pond, Czech Republic
• Walden Pond — associated with Henry David Thoreau

Further reading

• Herda DJ (2008) Zen & the Art of Pond Building Sterling Publishing Company. ISBN 9781402742743.
• W.H. MacKenzie and J.R. Moran (2004). "Wetlands of British Columbia: A Guide to Identification. Ministry of Forests, Land Management Handbook 52.