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I have friends in California that breed koi for "fun" so this year I'll give it a try. It's not easy breeding high quality koi in a hobbyist backyard since you'll need two major things, alot of space to grow out the babies and good parent stock. Any dimwit can breed fugly koi, that's easy but try breeding show quality koi and see what you get. The professionals (Japanese breeders that do this for a living) actually get less than 1% of the hatched eggs to turn out to be show koi and since a female koi can produce about 250,000 to half a million eggs when bred think of all the koi that's made in order to get a decent quality koi.
It's all a numbers game, keep as many alive as you can until you can cull them and then keep the better ones to grow on. Now koi do not produce true, thus the ratio of high quality koi to total koi hatched. If you want high quality babies then you'll need high quality parents think of Kate Beckinsale versus Rose Ann Barr. Which would produce higher quality babies?
This year's female kohaku is:
This is the second female I'm using this year bred in mid May, I bred another female in early April and got alot of fries but that was the best i could do. Within 2-3 weeks they all died, this was a miserable failure...
So on the second round of breeding a month later I learned a few things, don't be greedy and try to keep all the fries, that will be too hard to manage since they require good water & a constant supply of food. The fries are super sensitive to water quality, if the water has any ammonia they'll die.
I'm using two 500 gallons show tanks seen here, the third larger holds 800 gallons and is a QT with other koi already in it so I could not use it this year.
Here Are pics of the result from a week ago.
What's all that dust like spec you ask in this pic? Well that's the live food the fries are feeding upon.
There are fries that will grow faster than the others, these are called tobies and they need to be removed before they eat their smaller sibblings so I took these and out them into my planted guppy tank.
Stupid guppies would chase these fries around the tank and harrass them, just wait and see how big these will grow, those guppies will be dinner soon.
It's all a numbers game, keep as many alive as you can until you can cull them and then keep the better ones to grow on. Now koi do not produce true, thus the ratio of high quality koi to total koi hatched. If you want high quality babies then you'll need high quality parents think of Kate Beckinsale versus Rose Ann Barr. Which would produce higher quality babies?
This year's female kohaku is:
This is the second female I'm using this year bred in mid May, I bred another female in early April and got alot of fries but that was the best i could do. Within 2-3 weeks they all died, this was a miserable failure...
So on the second round of breeding a month later I learned a few things, don't be greedy and try to keep all the fries, that will be too hard to manage since they require good water & a constant supply of food. The fries are super sensitive to water quality, if the water has any ammonia they'll die.
I'm using two 500 gallons show tanks seen here, the third larger holds 800 gallons and is a QT with other koi already in it so I could not use it this year.
Here Are pics of the result from a week ago.
What's all that dust like spec you ask in this pic? Well that's the live food the fries are feeding upon.
There are fries that will grow faster than the others, these are called tobies and they need to be removed before they eat their smaller sibblings so I took these and out them into my planted guppy tank.
Stupid guppies would chase these fries around the tank and harrass them, just wait and see how big these will grow, those guppies will be dinner soon.
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