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Koi Breeding: Everything You Need To Know About It
Koi breeding is not easy if what you aim for is to produce high-quality fish for competition reasons. Before you can have a prize-winning koi fish, you will need to cull and discard several thousand fry. The koi breeding process is long and hard but it is all worth it.
Choosing the Parents
Choose the male and female from the same variety you want to reproduce. If you wish to cross-breed, choose varieties carefully and research more on the type of offspring you're most likely to get. Keep in mind that the dominant genes are those from the male parent.
Make sure to use only adult fish for breeding purposes. The ideal breeding age of the female is from 5 years onwards as their eggs are larger and more fertile. Watch out for breeding females under the age of 4 years old as your koi might lose their colors and patterns if bred at a young age. The female koi is ready to spawn if you find it sucking at the sides of the pond, trying to clear an area where she can deposit her eggs.
Male koi can start spawning upon reaching the age of two as soon as small white nodules show up on the pectoral fins as well as on the gill plates. You can actually feel those parts to be rougher than usual. You can use the younger males every two weeks but allow a longer time interval for older males to maximize 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 consumed by the other fish while the females will be more stressed. The net result will be offspring of inferior quality. Besides, a pond filled with eggs will harbor harmful bacteria that will negatively affect the well-being of your koi population.
If you are serious in koi breeding, you will need to use a controlled approach. Place the koi brooders in a separate pond and make sure to hang spawning media from the walls of the pond. The female will have them to place her eggs which can be somewhere 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 material.
During courtship, the male chases the female and forces her against the walls of the pond to induce spawning. If there are two or even three males in the pond, they will group on her to simultaneously fertilize the eggs.
You will find out that the Koi have spawned when there is foam on the surface of the water and the distinct smell of ammonia. By then, you will need to move the female to another pond where she can recover her strength. Take away the males too; or else, they may feed on the eggs.
Culling
The fry will get out of their eggshells in 5 to 7 days. They will continue growing and you can begin culling on the sixth week. Remove the baby koi with deformities like lacking fins, deformed mouths, colorless, and also single color.
Culling is vital 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 do not cull, the undesirable koi will still compete with the good koi for food and 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 organic food. As they grow bigger, you can resume the selection process until you get only the best koi that you want to keep or sell.
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