Kin Kikokuryu Spawn 7/5/2013

Hello, here is a video of a couple of our fish that had just finished spawning . Koi lay a very large number of eggs to insure survivors in the wild. For every 2.2 lbs. of body weight a female will lay approximately 100,000 eggs. This female is about 2 pounds so we should have 100,000 eggs or so in this pond. Immediately after spawning is complete we pull the adults from the pond. If left with the eggs they will quickly eat nearly all of them. We then add an anti-fungal to keep the eggs from getting fungus and insure a high hatch rate. It is usually 3 days till the eggs hatch depending on water temperature. At first the fry can't swim, they kind of move around in bursts and then sink to the bottom. After a few days they will make their way to the surface and take in a gulp of air. This fills their swim bladder and makes them buoyant so they can swim freely without sinking.  It is at this time they start to feed on small particles in the water. After 30 days or so, depending on how fast they grow, we have to sort through the fish and remove any deformed  and unwanted fish. This culling process takes place up to 4 more times till you have only a small number of the most desired fish. We will reduce the number from 100,000 down to only 250 or so. These are the fish with the best color, pattern and body shape. And those are the fish we will offer for sale.

First culling for Matsukawabake 7/1/13

Hello from Mountain Top Koi!

Above and below: are pictures of some of the Matsukawabake fry that were not yet culled.

Today on our koi farming adventures we culled the pairing of Matsukawabake which is a scaled color changing koi and by color changing it is black or white. This pond did not have as many fry as we had thought we think it is because of the pairing we used which were two young Matsukawabake. I will provide examples at the bottom of the post. If you take a look at the picture above of the koi that we toke a picture of that they have no set pattern and that they are pitch black, we took the initiative and culled differently then most farmers would do and pulled the smallest of the koi out. This is because Matsukawabake are not a very high selling fish like Sanke(Sanke are basically a tri-colored fish that has white, black, and red on it BUT no black touches the head which make it a Sanke.), Showa(Showa is almost identical to a Sanke except that it can have black on its head in fact it usually must have black on the head for a top quality koi.), and Kohaku (Kohaku is a white base fish with a red Hi-pattern over its back categorized into steps ranging from 1 step to 4 steps.). Because of this we decided to keep more of the average large koi (What size they mainly were)whats funny is that these koi averaged larger then the Taisho Sanke Dainichi koi we spawned. Luckily it didn't take long to finish this group and we drained and refilled the pond back to regular size and tomorrow will commence with the culling of the Taisho Sanke again. We are culling them again because we saw rather large Tobis starting to appear inside of the pond beginning to eat all the other top quality koi so we are going to cull through them and put them in the Tobi pond.

Above: This is a picture of the Matsukawabake fry after we had completed culling them.

Above: One of us scoping out a bad fry.

Above: This is our culling station is located where we commence the magic of sorting.

Above: The pond is drained and ready for culling.

Above: This is the domestic Matsukawabake female that spawned the eggs.

Above: This is the Takahashi Matsukawabake male that fertilized the clutch of eggs. (Takahashi is a Japanese koi breeder so this fish is Japanese.)