Things You Should Know About Koi Breeding
Koi breeding is not easy if what you aim for is to make high-quality fish for competition reasons. Before you can obtain a prize-winning koi fish, you will have to cull and discard several thousand fry. The koi breeding process is lengthy and difficult but it is worth it all.
Picking the Parents
Select the male and female from the exact same variety you want to reproduce. If you wish to cross-breed, choose varieties carefully and study more on the sort of offspring you're likely to get. Just remember that the dominant genes are the ones from the male parent.
Be sure to use only matured fish for breeding purposes. The suitable breeding age of the female is from 5 years forward as their eggs are larger and much more fertile. Beware of breeding females younger than 4 years old as your koi might lose their colors and patterns if bred at an early age. The female koi is ready to spawn if you find it sucking at the edges of the pond, trying to clear a place where she can deposit her eggs.
Male koi can begin spawning upon reaching the age of two when small white nodules appear on the pectoral fins and gill plates. You can actually feel those areas 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 some other fish while the females will be more anxious. The net result will be offspring of bad quality. Besides, a pond filled with eggs will harbor harmful bacteria that will adversely affect the well-being of your koi population.
If you are serious in koi breeding, you will have to use a controlled method. Place the koi brooders in a different pond and be sure to hang spawning media from the sides of the pond. The female will need them to place her eggs which can be somewhere between 100,000 to 500,000 depending on her mass. You can use ropes, artificial grasses, natural plants, vegetable sacking, as well as cloth strips as spawning material.
During courtship, the male chases the female and forces her towards the walls of the pond to induce spawning. If there are two or 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 that time, you will need to transfer the female to another pond where she can regain her strength. Remove the males too; or else, they may feed on the eggs.
Culling
The fry will break 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 missing fins, deformed mouths, colorless, and single color.
Culling is essential in
koi breeding. You need to reduce the numbers so the great quality fry can get to a decent size by the end of the season. If you do not cull, the unwanted koi will still compete with the good koi for food and also space. Culled fry are usually destroyed or fed to the other fish.
You can release your selected young koi in a mud pond that is very rich in organic food. As they grow bigger, you can resume the selection procedure until you get only the ideal koi that you would like to keep or sell.
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