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Koi Breeding: Learn More About It
Koi breeding is hard if what you aim for is to make high-quality fish for competition reasons. Before you can have a prize-winning koi fish, you will have to cull and discard several thousand fry. The koi breeding process is long and hard but it is all worth it.
Picking the Parents
Select the male and female from the same variety you want to reproduce. If you wish to cross-breed, choose varieties carefully and study more on the type of offspring you're most likely to get. Just remember that the dominant genes are those from the male parent.
Make sure to use only adult fish for breeding applications. The appropriate breeding age of the female is from 5 years onwards as their eggs are larger and much more fertile. Watch out for breeding females under the age of 4 years old as your koi could lose their colors and patterns if bred at a young age. The female koi is ready to spawn if you see it sucking at the sides of the pond, aiming to clear a place where she can deposit her eggs.
Male koi can begin spawning upon reaching the age of two as soon as small white nodules show up on the pectoral fins and gill plates. You can actually feel those parts to be rougher than usual. You can make use of the younger males every two weeks but give a longer time interval for older males to make best use of their fertility potential.
Spawning
Koi will normally spawn in the early summer months. If you let that to happen, however, the eggs will only be eaten by the other fish while the females will be more stressed. The net outcome will be offspring of bad quality. Besides, a pond packed with eggs will harbor harmful bacteria that will negatively affect the health of your koi population.
If you are serious in koi breeding, you will need to use a controlled approach. Put the koi brooders in a different pond and make sure to hang spawning media from the sides of the pond. The female will have them to place her eggs which can be anywhere between 100,000 to 500,000 depending on her weight. You can make use of ropes, artificial grasses, natural plants, vegetable sacking, or cloth strips as spawning materials.
During courtship, the male pursues the female and forces her against the walls of the pond to initiate spawning. If there are two or even three males in the pond, they will group on her to simultaneously fertilize the eggs.
You will know that the Koi have spawned when there is foam on the surface of the water and the distinct scent of ammonia. By that time, you will need to move the female to a different pond where she can recover her strength. Take away the males too; otherwise, they may feed on the eggs.
Culling
The fry will get out of their eggshells in 5 to 7 days. They will keep on growing and you can start culling on the sixth week. Remove the baby koi with deformities such as lacking fins, deformed mouths, colorless, and single color.
Culling is crucial in koi breeding. You need to reduce the numbers so the good quality fry can get to a reasonable size by the end of the season. If you don't cull, the unwanted koi will still compete with the good koi for food as well as space. Culled fry are normally destroyed or fed to the other fish.
You can release your chosen young koi in a mud pond that is very rich in natural food. As they grow bigger, you can resume the selection process until you get only the perfect koi that you would like to keep or sell.
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Not only does having a koi filter system installed help make your koi pond more attractive, it also does a lot to keep your koi fish healthy. Koi fish are highly sensitive to the pH balance and density of the water they're in compared to other types of fish.
What Makes Koi Very Koi?
Koi are very popular fish bred and cared for by hobbyists the world over. Koi is a Japanese word that means "carp" and includes the dull gray wild carp caught in rivers and lakes for food, as well as the brightly colored varieties.
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