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Thread: Koi spawning

  1. #21
    Hi Rob, good to see you on here!

    Another option seeing as you'll be tight on space might be to try a shiro set. (Think between us we could rattle up a half decent pair or trio!) With them you cull all but the black fry nice and early so it might give you a fighting chance of keeping the numbers down early on which could improve the chance of getting something decent. However they are trickier in every other respect! Happy to give you a hand if you want mate.

  2. #22
    Hi Ed, so your back to the real world then after all the mad but great wedding stuff ;-). Thanks for the offer bud. I did consider showa and shiro bud decided that although it makes the numbers easier initially as you mentioned everything else is more difficult. Iam leaning towards either a kohaku or a chag spawn.....both have there adantages and issue. Kohaku once you get them to the first cull you can do a pretty decent job but chags once you remove the magoi i reckon i would need them a lot bigger to be able to cull with any degree of logic.
    Any way first things first i need to start getting stuff together.....
    Rob

  3. #23
    Dave, sre you planning on breeding this year? If so what variety. Have you ever bred any single colour koi like yamas, i would imagine the culling is a nightmare.
    Rob

  4. #24
    Quote Originally Posted by eds View Post
    With them you cull all but the black fry nice and early so it might give you a fighting chance of keeping the numbers down early on which could improve the chance of getting something decent. However they are trickier in every other respect!
    What makes you say cull all but the black?

    I spoke to many a dealer about these as a pair. And some wouldn't even bring fish from Japan over that actually had any black. They had to be all white fish.

    Just curious as when we spawned ours. All be it a shiro and kumo... we kept a mixture of both and have subsequently got white fish that are now only showing sumi coming through.

    Interested
    Blog, Koi, Everything.

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  5. #25
    Hi Dawn,
    Shiro and showa are black fish with a white overlay from my understanding so at a few days old all the black fry are kept and the white fry discarded. These fry then turn white as they grow and show baby sumi which can be an indication of the future patterning. This often sinks down as nisai in effect the white scales thicken and cover the sumi beneath.So fish at this age can appear whiter. Sumi then either returns to the surface or not ...thats koi ;-)
    I am no expert on this and i am sure there are people on here who have a better understanding of this than me..but this is my interpretation.
    Rob

  6. #26
    I've just been watching 2 males relentlessly chasing a female round and round pushing her up the sides of the pond (fortunately all curved) 2 hours today and the same yesterday, a couple of days ago I did a 50% water change, the water temp is around 20c, am I likely to get a pond full of eggs? she didn't particularly look swollen with eggs. I've no spare or quarantine tanks as I this was the last thing I was expecting with all the winter problems we've had, what will happen to the fry if the hatch with the rest of the fish, I've heard they get eaten? they certainly like to eat any tadpole that end up in there.

  7. #27
    Extreme Koi Member Rank = Supreme Champion Davej's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ThreeFishes View Post
    Dave, sre you planning on breeding this year? If so what variety. Have you ever bred any dingle colour koi like yamas, i would imagine the culling is a nightmare.
    Rob
    Sore point, yes I was thinking about it and even sourced a male mukashi to put together with a high class 86cm Yam, but lost the Yam a month ago.. This Koi keeping lark is painful at times.

    Options were to look at another possible set or change plans, decided on the latter and have a fairly sweet tosai coming in, that along with a few companions will tie up the growing on system for a year or maybe 18months if I can keep them alive that long

    If/when I breed them again its likely to be Gin Matsuba if I can find a Boy. If Not Kohaku.

    Dave

  8. #28
    Sorry to here about the yama :-(
    I really hope i can get everything sorted to have a go this year. I dont want to try half cocked......i want to get it right and give myself a decent chance of making a go of it. If i have to wait untill next year so be it.
    I hope you do have a go at matsuba as you can breed me one ;-) i really like them...could you not pair with a kujaku and maybe get hi matsuba, gin matsuba and kujaku from the same spawn?
    Rob

  9. #29
    Extreme Koi Member Rank = Supreme Champion Davej's Avatar
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    Rob

    If there's a will there's a way

    I'd still suggest considering having a play with a stock tank or two, even if you do it purely as a trial to get the feel of things. So much easier to get temps around the optimum.

    Chags - I'd think an easy cull, deformities, colour, scalation, and size .


    Dave

  10. #30

    Breeding Koi

    Hi Rob,

    Now I don't want to put you off breeding Koi but thought I'd post something I wrote in 2011 It's a bit long but was written as a fun piece

    Breeding Koi

    First I think that you need to decide why you want to breed Koi. Professional breeders, be they English or Japanese, struggle to make a living from this so you don’t have much chance of making any money unless you have just won the lottery and if this is the case then buy the Koi you want and sit and relax in front of your gigantic pond run by your paid employees.

    So that leaves us with backyard curiosity Koi breeding. I have breed Koi this way for about 5 years but didn’t bother in 2011. Koi will of course breed all by themselves without any involvement from us. There are two methods of breeding open to us amateur breeders, flock/mass spawning in the pond or selective spawning where we choose the parents and hope to produce award winning Koi.

    One of the best breeding triggers is new water as is often witnessed at summer Koi shows. If the Koi are ready then within hours of being placed in the show vat the Koi breed, much to the consternation of the water team.

    If you’re flock spawning then spray new water onto the pond surface for a few hours, you need to change at least 15% of the pond volume in a few hours. Even then they might not spawn when we want them to.

    A better method is to prepare a temporary pond with clean water, a plastic type pool will do but don’t fill it. In either case I use clean green spawning brushes as a breeding medium. Select the Koi you would like to breed from and place them in the temporary pool in the afternoon. Assuming you’ve selected Koi that are ready to breed then normally they will breed early the next morning. If they haven’t breed within 48hrs place them back in the main pond.

    Assuming they have bred then the brushes will be full of eggs. At this moment I remove the brushes and place them in a ready prepared pond. I use a good quality plastic dustbin half full of clean water and heated to 23°C with an aquarium heater with a vigorous flow of air from an airstone flowing through the brushes. I also install a small spot light which I leave on 24hrs a day. Note: some plastics leech toxins into the water and after 3 or 4 days all the fry will be dead!!

    After 36 hours turn the air down to a VERY gentle flow. From 2-3 days the eggs will begin hatching and if you look carefully you will see that the fry will be clinging to the side of the dustbin. On the 4th day when 10-15% of the fry are free swimming I start feeding.

    Now the fun begins! The fry need frequent feeding with at least 60% protein foods. They need feeding at least every 2hrs although at night, I personally, don’t get up!!

    You will find that some fry die for many reasons, deformities etc and some will be eaten by their brothers. Don’t worry, you will have hundreds of fry swimming by now and a few deaths mean that you have less to cull (nice word for kill).

    I stopped trying to culture green water etc years ago, it’s far too hard to try and coordinate everything and a lot of work for nothing. I only use shop bought products. The company Ocean Nutrition sells Instant Baby Brine Shrimp in a jar, these are newly hatched Artemia in a liquid and are ideal for newly hatched fry. This is the only food I feed for the first 5 days and the fry grow very fast and you will need quite a few jars. From the 5th day I also start adding JBL Nova Tom which is in red powder form and is also Artemia. After 7 days I start feeding a Starter food for small fish which is a 0.8mm size pellet with a 64% protein level, as well as high protein flake foods and freeze dried products.

    All this feeding means that the fry will grow very quick!! It also means that you are fouling the water at a very fast rate and even from the 4th day the water needs attention. I leave the brushes in the water to give the fry somewhere to rest but this means that the decaying eggs and the uneaten food are polluting the water. As the fry are very small I dilute the pollution by topping up with clean heated water a few times a day. After one week you will be changing 20% of water a day or the fry will die in droves. At 10 days I move them into a prepared heated pond of 3 meters by 1.5 meters with a depth of 30cms. The pond has to be equipped with a filter to keep the parameters correct; the submerged pump has to have a large inlet to prevent too much suction and needs to be covered with a pair of tights to protect the fry.

    So after 6 weeks, you have tended to the fry for many hours and spent at least £200’s on food and have too many fry. Do you still want to breed Koi?

    Hang-on I’ve left out the best bit, at days 4 or 5 you might have 500 – 600 (or more) fry swimming and eating you out of house and home. This is obviously too many for your garden pond later so you must cull. This needs doing every 3/4 days because the more you have the more it costs in food and the more risk of pollution you have, which could kill them all in a few hours. At first culling is easy, the choice I mean. You select the deformed Koi first but you must soon choose perfectly good fry. Do not keep only the biggest ones, these are called Toby’s, and are normally single coloured Koi that eat their brothers and sisters. If you want to keep a few of these then you must have a second pond for them.

    After 4 months you will have a pond full of average quality Koi that you don’t know what to do with but at least YOU (with the Koi’s help) have produced them. Have fun!!

  11. #31
    Back from the dead Rob! Actually just working too hard but will try and get a better balance over the next few weeks - the pond is finally clearing nicely now too.

    Quote Originally Posted by Davej View Post
    Chags - I'd think an easy cull, deformities, colour, scalation, and size .
    Maurice always said they were the hardest to cull as picking out the truly exceptional fish with perfect scaling is so hard compared to the ordinary ones. So culling to ordinary level easy; to perfect level a nightmare!

  12. #32
    Quote Originally Posted by Dave Collins View Post
    Hi Rob,

    Now I don't want to put you off breeding Koi but thought I'd post something I wrote in 2011 It's a bit long but was written as a fun piece

    Breeding Koi

    First I think that you need to decide why you want to breed Koi. Professional breeders, be they English or Japanese, struggle to make a living from this so you don’t have much chance of making any money unless you have just won the lottery and if this is the case then buy the Koi you want and sit and relax in front of your gigantic pond run by your paid employees.

    So that leaves us with backyard curiosity Koi breeding. I have breed Koi this way for about 5 years but didn’t bother in 2011. Koi will of course breed all by themselves without any involvement from us. There are two methods of breeding open to us amateur breeders, flock/mass spawning in the pond or selective spawning where we choose the parents and hope to produce award winning Koi.

    One of the best breeding triggers is new water as is often witnessed at summer Koi shows. If the Koi are ready then within hours of being placed in the show vat the Koi breed, much to the consternation of the water team.

    If you’re flock spawning then spray new water onto the pond surface for a few hours, you need to change at least 15% of the pond volume in a few hours. Even then they might not spawn when we want them to.

    A better method is to prepare a temporary pond with clean water, a plastic type pool will do but don’t fill it. In either case I use clean green spawning brushes as a breeding medium. Select the Koi you would like to breed from and place them in the temporary pool in the afternoon. Assuming you’ve selected Koi that are ready to breed then normally they will breed early the next morning. If they haven’t breed within 48hrs place them back in the main pond.

    Assuming they have bred then the brushes will be full of eggs. At this moment I remove the brushes and place them in a ready prepared pond. I use a good quality plastic dustbin half full of clean water and heated to 23°C with an aquarium heater with a vigorous flow of air from an airstone flowing through the brushes. I also install a small spot light which I leave on 24hrs a day. Note: some plastics leech toxins into the water and after 3 or 4 days all the fry will be dead!!

    After 36 hours turn the air down to a VERY gentle flow. From 2-3 days the eggs will begin hatching and if you look carefully you will see that the fry will be clinging to the side of the dustbin. On the 4th day when 10-15% of the fry are free swimming I start feeding.

    Now the fun begins! The fry need frequent feeding with at least 60% protein foods. They need feeding at least every 2hrs although at night, I personally, don’t get up!!

    You will find that some fry die for many reasons, deformities etc and some will be eaten by their brothers. Don’t worry, you will have hundreds of fry swimming by now and a few deaths mean that you have less to cull (nice word for kill).

    I stopped trying to culture green water etc years ago, it’s far too hard to try and coordinate everything and a lot of work for nothing. I only use shop bought products. The company Ocean Nutrition sells Instant Baby Brine Shrimp in a jar, these are newly hatched Artemia in a liquid and are ideal for newly hatched fry. This is the only food I feed for the first 5 days and the fry grow very fast and you will need quite a few jars. From the 5th day I also start adding JBL Nova Tom which is in red powder form and is also Artemia. After 7 days I start feeding a Starter food for small fish which is a 0.8mm size pellet with a 64% protein level, as well as high protein flake foods and freeze dried products.

    All this feeding means that the fry will grow very quick!! It also means that you are fouling the water at a very fast rate and even from the 4th day the water needs attention. I leave the brushes in the water to give the fry somewhere to rest but this means that the decaying eggs and the uneaten food are polluting the water. As the fry are very small I dilute the pollution by topping up with clean heated water a few times a day. After one week you will be changing 20% of water a day or the fry will die in droves. At 10 days I move them into a prepared heated pond of 3 meters by 1.5 meters with a depth of 30cms. The pond has to be equipped with a filter to keep the parameters correct; the submerged pump has to have a large inlet to prevent too much suction and needs to be covered with a pair of tights to protect the fry.

    So after 6 weeks, you have tended to the fry for many hours and spent at least £200’s on food and have too many fry. Do you still want to breed Koi?

    Hang-on I’ve left out the best bit, at days 4 or 5 you might have 500 – 600 (or more) fry swimming and eating you out of house and home. This is obviously too many for your garden pond later so you must cull. This needs doing every 3/4 days because the more you have the more it costs in food and the more risk of pollution you have, which could kill them all in a few hours. At first culling is easy, the choice I mean. You select the deformed Koi first but you must soon choose perfectly good fry. Do not keep only the biggest ones, these are called Toby’s, and are normally single coloured Koi that eat their brothers and sisters. If you want to keep a few of these then you must have a second pond for them.

    After 4 months you will have a pond full of average quality Koi that you don’t know what to do with but at least YOU (with the Koi’s help) have produced them. Have fun!!
    Thanks for the advice dave...i am not planning on going into this with a romantic notion that it will be a bed of roses and i will achive what pros cannot ;-) I am working with the vision of getting 2 or 3 nice koi a year out of a kohaku spawn so no delusions of grandure just a lot of culling....anybody know if koi whitebait is any good ? :-)
    Rob

  13. #33
    Quote Originally Posted by eds View Post
    Back from the dead Rob! Actually just working too hard but will try and get a better balance over the next few weeks - the pond is finally clearing nicely now too.



    Maurice always said they were the hardest to cull as picking out the truly exceptional fish with perfect scaling is so hard compared to the ordinary ones. So culling to ordinary level easy; to perfect level a nightmare!
    Hi Ed great to hear from you bud;-) Must get together for that beer soon...will give you a call. I have had several chats with maurice regarding culling chagoi and the keep rates. I think the problem i will have is keeping the numbers alive untill i can get them big enough to make out the exceptional ones with such limited space. But i want a maurice line soragoi so i had better get on and breed myself one :-)
    Rob

  14. #34
    This is the best thing for newly hatched fry. The company Ocean Nutrition sells Instant Baby Brine Shrimp in a jar, these are newly hatched Artemia in a liquid and are ideal for newly hatched fry.

    It is high protein and you will be amazed at the growth

  15. #35
    Extreme Koi Member Rank = Supreme Champion Davej's Avatar
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    Hiya

    Had a trawl for bulk packs of artemia cysts, as usual they are rip off prices in the UK best part of £90 for 500gm.

    Be pushing things delivery wise to import some in but should be around half to a third of the price.

    The last stock I had came from a supplier in Southend but I cant for the life of me find the details.

    Dave

  16. #36
    Quote Originally Posted by Davej View Post
    Hiya

    Had a trawl for bulk packs of artemia cysts, as usual they are rip off prices in the UK best part of £90 for 500gm.

    Be pushing things delivery wise to import some in but should be around half to a third of the price.

    The last stock I had came from a supplier in Southend but I cant for the life of me find the details.

    Dave
    You can get Russian pouches from TA aquaculture. A 550g pouch is £45 at the moment. They're very good quality too - I have a half used pouch in my fridge still that has 90% plus hatch rates.

  17. #37
    I still say the best food you can give them is stuff you can grow yourseld, even with the 'live food'

    I had a 50g pond with duck poo in and I bought several bags of daphnea, and bloodworm to start the process off. Before the fish spawned this process was going on and the daphnea were breeding like wildfire.

    I made my own 'baby food mix' with the help of finely ground bloodworm and daphnea, and regular high protein koi food. (Saki Hikari, and sturgeon food)

    The shrimp I actually only fed for around a week. I started them on the above, wet mix (with Sansai Biorex and water) at the same time, with a body building 'whey protein' mixed in as well. Cost me £20 for a tub where I used around a handful of the mix, but it was well worth it.

    I introduced the daphnea and blood worm mix to my baby tank at 3 weeks, where they grew at an even faster rate.

    The funny thing for me was, I could see the larger fry chasing the baby daphnea... I guess in the end the fry won out as one day around 8 weeks in the daphnea were no more.

    The biggest issue for me was water quality... at 3 weeks my nitrite was through the roof. As blood red as it could be. I was changing water in three full halves every day. Despite the temp drop with it.... the fry survived and thrived with few losses. (bar ones being eaten by the tobys)

    I only put my filters on at 8 weeks, with matting around the filter. But some fish still got through and died.

    just my experience.
    Blog, Koi, Everything.

    http://kanundra.com/

    http://mybook.to/TSK

    http://author.to/DC

 

 
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