Winter can be tough for any animal, but it seems especially so for freshwater fish. Trapped under the ice, with little food, plant growth, and oxygen make lake life in winter a seemly destitute environment. So how do fish in lakes and ponds survive? As it turns out there are four main factors that fish need to overcome to survive harsh winter Including:

1. Thermal stress

2. Starvation

3. Predation

4. Disease

If a fish can overcome these four factors and oxygen depletion (which we are not going to cover in this article), their likelihood of survival over winter is pretty high. We will cover each of these four topics in this article.