Adventures in Spawning
First Try, Summer, 2004
This page details my on-going adventure in trying to breed koi during the spring and summer of 2004. Breeding koi is one of those things that everyone says is best left to the experts. The backyard breeder usually has no idea about the bloodlines of the parents he/she chooses to bred, nor do she/he have full access to separation ponds, mud ponds, etc, and finally most people are not comfortable with the culling process. Despite these and other obstacles, this koi lover waded in where wiser koi enthusiasts knew not to swim.
Preparation
The idea of breeding koi had always intrigued me since my visit to Bertrelle Caswelle's pond and backyard breeding facility in the early 1980's.. Dr. Caswelle's operation was set up to do three to five spawnings a year. After reading about spawning in Peter Waddington's book 'Koi-Kichi' and the 'Tetra Encyclopedia of Koi.' I also did an internet search and found the following 3 links useful.
Of the three links, the link to the Australian Koi Association is the most complete. That site even has an introduction to basic koi genetics. The Koi-UK site chronicles several attempts of different Koi patterns. It is in the form of a diary.
In the summer of 2003 I was invited to talk to the Nishiki Koi Club in Orange County. As my luck, or unluck, would have it, the meeting was held at a member's house who did occasional spawnings and actually got some good fish. Louie, the owner/breeder, told me that some of his fish have actually done quite well in local shows. The more I talked to Louie, the more I realized that I had everything necessary, except experience, to try to replicate Louie's efforts.
After meeting Louie, I surveyed my koi facility. I had a 700 gallon show tank that I kept for the purposes of isolating new koi and medicating sick koi. I only lacked some spawning media and a source for fry food. Both shortages could be easily overcome by a little local and internet shopping. I only lacked time, but it was an easy task to convince myself that now that I was semi-retired, I needed something to occupy my time, so spawning media and fry food were acquired.
A Failed First Attempt
Now that the decision to breed had been made, parents had to be selected. I confess to being a novice on koi genetics, but after consulting the Australia Koi web site linked above, I came to the conclusion that one could bred white skinned fish (A white skinned fish with red or black highlights like a Kohaku or a Sanke for example) or black skinned fish (A black shinned fish with red and white highlights such as a showa). I decided to breed showa, and selected one showa female and 2 showa males where one of the males was ginrin, which means it had metallic scales.
The spawning pond was prepared. It consisted of a 750 gallon circular show tank half filled. Two sets of spawning ropes were laid around the edges, and aeration was added. I didn't have any water hyacinths, but I did add some water lettuce to act as a sort of veggie filter. I then waited until the weather warmed up. In early May, 2004, conditions seemed perfect. The weather was balmy at night so the water stayed above 66 degrees. The selected showa parents were added, and the next morning the unmistakable signs of spawning were not only visible, but hearable. The picture below shows the spawning. The males herd the female over the spawning ropes, the green things, and while she lays some eggs, they fertilize them. The milky color of the water is the excess male sperm. It has a peculiar odor to say the least. After signs of spawning ceased, the parents were returned to the main pond. The female was placed in an isolation cage so that she could rest a day.
The picture below shows a portion of the spawning rope after spawning. The opaque little white colored spheres are the unfertilized eggs. If you look close there are some somewhat clear spheres, which are the fertilized eggs. There were eggs all over the place. The plant roots were loaded with eggs, the bottom and sides of the pond had eggs attached everywhere. Even the pond thermometer was covered with eggs.
After koi spawn, there are three immediate problems. The first is a water quality issue. The excess male koi sperm turns the water cloudy, and adds a peculiar smell to the pond. This problem can be handled in one of two ways: put the eggs, which are attached to the spawning media, into another pond, or do a major water exchange. In both cases, care must be taken to control water temperature and not chill the precious eggs. Not having a second pond, transfer was not an option. I performed a 75% water replacement was done. There was a 2 degree difference between my main pond which I used as a source of aged water and the spawning pond. By transferring out water from the spawning pond at twice the rate aged water from the main pond was added, an exchange without thermal shock was accomplished.
The second problem is that unfertilized eggs can develop fungus which, if left unchecked, can affect the viable spawn. The standard practice is to add some malachite green to the water after the egg's surface has hardened. Hardening takes one day. Instead of using malachite green, I used a commercial product from my koi medicine cabinet called "Paracide Green," which is designed to fight not only fungus but external parasites. The other ingredient is something called formalin, a type of formaldehyde. Biologists use formaldehyde to preserve and embalm.
The third problem is maintaining a minimum pond water temperature above 63 degrees Fahrenheit. Optimum temperature would be 68-70 degrees. Cooler and eggs take longer to hatch. Hotter and oxygen concentration goes down and hatched fry cannot survive. Right after the spawn the Southern California weather turned cold and the spawning pond dropped to 59-61 for a day. To combat this situation, I covered the pond and added two 300 watt aquarium heaters. In two days the temperature was back above 65 degrees.
As the reader can probably figure, the first spawn was a total failure. Was the failure the result of the formalin in the fungicide or a exposure to sub-optimum temperatures? I don't know but I am not going to run the experiments necessary to find out. There was some mosquito larvae in the pond, so I expect the temperature drop was the main problem. Whatever, the result was no live fry evident twelve days after spawning.
A Second Attempt Summer, 2004
After deciding that I was going to try again, the spawning pond was cleaned and prepared. This time no water lettuce was used, mainly because the spawning activity in the first spawning attempt really tore the water lettuce apart. The new parents were introduced. In addition to aeration, the aquarium heaters and pond cover were introduced. A short chronology of this ongoing experiment is now presented.
June 14. Kohaku female, tancho kohaku male and sanke male added to the spawning pond.
June 16. Spawn completed, parents removed, water exchange completed.
June 17. Fungicide designed specifically to protect spawn from fungus added.
June 19. Free swimming fry detected. Koi first hatch and then attach themselves to something while the egg sack is absorbed. It takes two days to absorb the egg sack.
June 20-25. Increasing number of free swimming spawn observed each day. Fry are about 1 cm long and look like tiny threads moving about. The fry like to hide in the spawning rope or at the sides of the pond. It looks like the fry try to eat something stuck to sides of the pond. Apparently eggs do not all hatch at once which surprised me.
June 20. Started feeding by mixing 1 teaspoon spirulina algae powder to water, and adding about 6 ounces 8 times a day. Started brine shrimp culture.
June 23. Started feeding brine shrimp in addition to spirulina mixture. Only have enough brine shrimp for three days.
June 26. No more brine shrimp, have started feeding 'Liquifry' fry mix and a generic koi fry food purchased from 'Aquatic-Eco' while maintaining spirulina mixture. Fry number appear to be over 1000. Some fry appear to have ogon or yellow color.
July 3. The water is starting to turn green and I feel it is time to add a filter. The filter chosen must be efficient but it must not 'suck' the fry into the filter intake. I decided to build a filter myself, and I settled on a two stage design. The first stage is some open cell foam purchased from Mystic Koi. The foam is about eighteen inches long by 8 inches by eight inches with a 2.25 inch circular channel through the center. (See side view below) I inserted a piece of perforated 2 inch pipe capped at one end with a small fountain pump on the other end. The couplings and end caps of 2 inch pvc pipe have an outside diameter of 2.25 inch so the fit is snug. The diagram shows the pipe attached to a small fountain pump. The 2 inch pvc pipe was capped at one end and the pump attached at the other end. To allow water to flow through the sponge and into the pipe I drilled about 40 quarter inch holes randomly in the pipe. The pipe is inserted into the hole in the center of the form. As mentioned above, the 2 inch cap at one end and coupling with reducers at the other end formed a tight seal when the pipe was inserted into the open circular center of the foam. During operation, the water flows through the open cell foam and into the pipe where it is pumped into the second stage. The open cell foam prevents the fry from being sucked into the pump and hopefully it will act like a biological filter. To 'charge' the biological side of the foam, I did the koivet trick of soaking the foam in my bead filter cleaning discharge. This is supposed to get the foam saturated with beneficial bacteria. The second stage of the fry pond filter is a simple home made trickle filter. Other names for trickle filters are wet-dry filters or nitrate towers. The trickle filter made from a brand new 5 gallon plastic paint can with a diffuser in the top and holes in the bottom. The diffuser 'sprays' rhe incoming water over the trickle media and the water dribbles out the bottom of the plastic can. The second stage trickle filter is suspended over the pond. The plastic pail is filled with bio-ball media that I removed from the main pond's trickle filter, so the trickle media should already be biologically active. The trickle filter's output 'gently rains' into the fry pond adding aeration, which is an added bonus.
The picture below shows the trickle filter suspended over the spawn pond. If you look closely at the bottom of the filter you can see the water drizzling out of the filter and into the pond.
July 10. The pond water is too green to get fry pictures. The fry seem to hear you walk towards the pond and go deep. If you sit still you can see them. I have seen a couple of 'toby's' including a 'moby toby.' A toby is a very large fry that eats his siblings in order to get his extra nutrition. According to the literature, toby's seldom are good fish so it is best to cull them and see what the saved uneaten siblings turn into. I have a couple that are literally 5 times as fat as their siblings. My wife and I have caught 6 but 'moby toby' is still loose. Like the whale 'Moby Dick' he dives deep into the green water to delay, but noot avoid, I hope, capture. Because of the green water I have cut down on the spirulina and I am now feeding fry food purchased from the local aquarium shop. Posted a net to the AKCA bulletin board. Link is to AKCA home page so click on that pages link to its 'Bulletin Board' located on the bottom of their home page. The two responses indicate Toby's are 10 times the size of their siblings.
July 16. Water has cleared up and there are lots of fry of all sizes. Some runts look like newly hatched fry. The fry seem to be pecking off the food particles that are gathered on the surface of the sponge filter. The picture below is a poor retouched picture of the fry. I made an attempt to get rid of the reflection but I don't have a polarizing filter to get rid of the reflection. I guess I also need a macro adapter for my Canon Powershot digital camera. The shadoe of the notorious 'Moby Toby' is visible near the left center of the picture.
The majority of the fry are a gold color, then there are a bunch of grey fish, a few white fish, and a small number that have black marks.
July 30. just got back from visiting Glacier Bay in Alaska. Everyone ought to go once. while I was gone I had a neighbor kid feed and do partial water changes. Everything seemed to survive.
August 10. I decided to add some 'natural' filtration to the fry pond. I had saved some water lettuce from the first spawning attempt so I disinfected it and added it to the spawning pond. The stuff is growing so it must be happy. There used to be a product called 'aquamats' that looks like a big version of spawning media. The stuff was advertised with a claim that after placing it on the bottom of your pond and with proper aeration and water movement, the aquamat, which looked like artificial grass acted like filter mats in a regular upflow filter. I put the spawning media back into the fry pond in place of aquamats. To add water movement I put a small water fountain pump with protected inputs to create a current around the fry pond. There appears to be something growing or attached to the roots of the water lettuce and spawning media that the fry love to munch on and hide in. Doesn't seem to hurt and fry are active.
August 19. The fry range in size from 0.75 inch to 3.5 inch with the majority between 1.25 and 1.75 inches. One of the big guys was a toby and actually ate a one inch fish in front of me. Not all the fry have changed color so I did a 'partial' cull. I culled all the 'big fish' without any pattern and those fry with deformities. About 10 percent of the fry have obvious deformities visible to the naked eye. Crooked tails, gill covers that don't cover the gills, and misshapen bodies are the most common deformities. I took all the water lettuce and spawning grass out of the spawning pond, and the number of fry, without a place to hide, appeared to double in number. The 'new' fry evidently hide and grew under the vegetation. Those 'big' guys somehow knew they were marked and swam like Olympians in search of a gold medal. The result was that about 200 small and 30 large were sent to the pet store where they will be sold as feeders. I tried to 'vacum' out the debris and waste on the pond floor before adding water from the big pond. I decided to segregate the 2 inch plus fry and put them in my floating isolator. The isolator is made of the same material that is used to construct a large koi net. Big fry can't get out but little fry can get in.
August 23. Found out my digital camera will do macro closeups but there is no depth-of-field. Still no polarizing filter to get rid of the glair and reflection. The picture below shows some of the fry. All the fry in focus are swimming near the pond surface. The deeper the fry are, the more out of focus they are. The 'picture grid' is the protective net covering the pond. The net squares are about 1 inch on a side. The fish you see are about 1.25 inches long. The bigger fish have gone down to the pond bottom and are out of focus. Fry at about this size gain color. The color is starting to show but is not vibrant. Note the many fish I missed when culling. There is a white bent tail at nine o'clock and a 'gold' one with a defective gill cover at about 4 o'clock (See the red dot at the end of the gill area, that's uncovered gills.) How many, if any, fry would you save in this picture? Remember color and pattern go downhill as fry grow up, but the color has yet to 'come out.' I think I might have a 'cull' party labor day weekend. Any volunteers?
Stay tuned. The fry are really starting to grow!
September 6, Labor Day. There was a heat wave in Southern California, temperatures in the low 100's, the fry are almost 3 months old and were really crowding the growing pond, so I decided to have a 'culling' party. I thought that 'all I had to do' was catch them all and put in a temporary 100 gallon holding pond, then sort and cull into keepers and feeders (I am giving the deformed and/or non-colored fry to a friend who owns a pet store and they are being sold as feeders.) Unfortunately, there are two things wrong with this plan. Since I have the water lettuce in the pond, there is 'stuff' on the bottom. Swishing a net through the water, even after removing the water lettuce, brings up clouds of debris resulting in clouded water. Second, regular nets aren't good enough. One needs a small seine net so that all the fry can be caught at once. Anyway, after catching about 80% of the fry, a three hour effort, we started culling. Only about 15% were kept. Fry ranged in size from 1 to 4 inches. I got rid of deformed, most of the ones with solid colors (white, gray, ogon or yellow, and orange-red) and some whose pattern was, to be kind, minimal. There are a surprisingly few kohaku (red-white) even though the parents were kohaku and sanke. Instead there are many hariwake (a yellow-white patterned fish) but I don't know whether that is because I am feeding growth food instead of color food. It will be interesting to ssee if the yellow darkens to an orange and that darkens to a red. Among the keepers, which I am reluctant to call tategoi which loosely translates to 'worth keeping an eye on,' are two real nice Sanke (red-black-white), several shiro-utsuri (a black banded white fish) and a couple of shiro-bekko (a black spotted white fish) plus some nice opons and hariwake. Interestingly, the kohaku that there are appear to be tancho (white fish with red dot on its forehead) like one of the fathers. More in about three weeks.
September 23. The water lettuce is withering, so I did a little inspection. At first I thought that it needed more sun. The fry pond is under the lath of my patio cover. Upon inspecting the plants themselves, I discovered that the water lettuce had few, if any, roots. The little ravenous koi fry were eating all the roots. I know that full grown koi will tear up water lilies, but this is ridiculous. Oh well, all the water lettuce is now in the compost pile. Here is a picture of the current crop. About half of these should have been culled.
June 5. After a year, I have kept about thirty fish, 25 kohaku, 4 shiro bekko and 4 sanke. Four or five were above average but not show quality. I gave about 50 fry to friends who had backyard ponds and over a thousand become feeder fish at a pet store. The big lesson was to be more deliberate in the culling. I would scoop out a bunch, do some culling, and stop after a bit. I never did a complete cull. I wasted too much food and pond space on all-white or all red fish. I was surprised at the number of fry with deformities and believe that this is a nutrition problem. Cost wise, each one of the fish that I kept cost me about twenty dollars in actual cash. I probably spent 4-6 hours a week working or admiring my efforts. My friends, many of them family and other koi enthusiasts, think I was crazy for trying to spawn koi, but I had a blast. Below is a poor picture, sorry, of some of the year old fry. There are Kohaku, Sanke, and Shiro Bekko in the mix. This is about half the spawn that I kept.
Summer, 2005
In 2005, I redid the showa spawn. Same parents but this time I was prepared for the cold snap. I had two 300 watt heaters in the spawning pond, so the eggs and the fry pond water never got below 67 degrees F.
On June 8, I cleaned the spawn pond from the previous year, filled it with water from the big pond, added the spawning rope, and transferred over one showa females and 2 showa males. One of the males was gin rin or metallic. The next morning spawning took place and by two in the afternoon, I took the proud parents out of the spawning pond. Four days later there was significant hatch. This is a picture of the fry at three weeks
Most of the above fry will be culled. When you bred Showa, a black fish with red and white highlights, you only keep the black fry or fry with black markings. Most of the fry you see would grow up to be white if allowed to mature.
This year's feeding program was significantly modified from last years. Instead of relying on a lot of dried fry food, I used frozen and fresh food for the first four weeks. For the three weeks I served a brew of spirulina and plankton mixed in water. About 2 tsp of spirulina and 4 tsp of plankton with mixed in a quart of water and a cup of the mixture was given four times a day. I also got a hold of a bunch of frozen daphnia cubes and gave 3 cubes with the spirulina-plankton mix. Starting at week three I substituted a mixture of plankton and dried powered koi growth for the spirulina plankton mixture. The biggest change was that from the first to fourth week I also feed baby brine shrimp that I hatched. My brine shrimp farming operation is pictured below.
I found a source of brine shrimp eggs on the internet and bought a pound for under twenty dollars. The bases of the three upside down soda bottles were also purchased on the internet. Each bottle was a two-liter soda bottle with the base cut off. The bottle was screwed into the base. The base has an air tube inlet at the base that keeps the water moving. I put 1.5 liters water, 2 tablespoons ice cream rock salt, and 2 teaspoons of brine shrimp eggs in each bottle and turned on the air pump to gentle. 24 hours later, the pump was turned off, the live brine shrimp settle to the base, the egg cases float, and the fry are drawn off from the bottom, and added to the pond. Everyday another batch of hatched fry is I haven't noticed as many deformed fry and have yet to see a toby.
On July 4, I did my first cull. We gathered about three hundred fry out. So far I have culled 4 times and removed over a thousand fry. For Showa, you are initially supposed to keep the dark and get rid of everything else. After a year, color is supposed to break out in about a year. Due to laziness and curiosity, in equal measures, my culling strategy was to get two containers full of pond water, throw some food on the top of the fry pond, and try to scoop as many fry into the first container as I can. The fry aren't feeding after the second scoop. Then I go through the fry one-by-one, and the keepers go back into the pond and the rest go to a local pet store. Some of these are sold as pond fish, and some end up as feeders.
What really surprised me was the diversity of the genetics of the fry. Everything from kohaku to Sanke to goshiki, plus showa, and everything in-between hatched. Breeders who know what they are doing discard all but the black or potential showa fry. To do that you need to be able to catch all the fry. I tried to take a picture of the fry population as of March 2006. There are several hundred black fry in the pictures below but they don't show up because they blend into the pond water. The pictures show diversity. Some of the non-showa, particularly those with metalic or gin scales, are quite striking.
If you look closely, you can see several showa in the lower right corner of the image above.
I ended up culling about four more times. Each time I would get rid of several hundred fry. By August 2006 I still had over a hundred small koi. About 75 of them were pond quality. Of the twenty five left maybe three or four we tatekoi. There are two striking shows, a ki utsuri (yellow fish with black bands) and one or two shiro utsuri (white fish with black bands). I ended up giving away about fifty and keeping thirty.
Lessons learned? It was a lot of work, a lot of fun, but if you aggregated the costs, it would have been cheaper to spend a thousand dollars on tatekoi at Mystic koi. About half the kohaku from the 2004 spawning lost all color, which is probably related to genetics. I am hoping the same thing does not happen to the 2005 showa spawn.
I think that I spent more than a thousand dollars on the two spawns. How can you say it cost a thousand dollars for two spawns? Consider
1 600 gallon temporary koi holding pond $350.00
About 10 medium air pumps (The cheap kind,
about 4 months, can't be repaired) $160.00
Brine shrimp eggs, hatching supplies $100.00
Various size small fry food $200.00
Electricity for 2 300 watt heaters $400.00
Spawning rope $ 50.00
The estimate for fry food is low. If you buy it retail, it is about five dollars a pound. A couple hundred 3-6 inch fish go through a pound in three days. If I had been more brutal in my culling, I think the results would have been better. The fry that I kept would have been in a better environment.
Will I attempt to spawn again? Right now I say no, but in a year or two, maybe yes. It would bean interesting club project.
Questions, suggestions, or comments, please email me at koilover@adelphia.net