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Things You Have To Know About Koi Breeding
Koi breeding is difficult if what you want is to make 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 difficult but it is all worth it.
Choosing 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 most likely to get. Keep in mind that the dominant genes are those from the male parent.
Be sure to use only adult 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. 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 a place where she can place her eggs.
Male koi can begin 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 areas to be rougher than usual. You can use the younger males every two weeks but give a lengthier time interval for older males to make best use of 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 get more stressed. The net result will be offspring of bad quality. Moreover, a pond packed 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 have to use a controlled approach. Place the koi brooders in a different pond and be sure to hang spawning media from the sides 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 use ropes, artificial grasses, natural plants, vegetable sacking, or cloth strips as spawning material.
During courtship, the male pursues the female and forces her towards the walls of the pond to initiate 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 water surface and the distinct smell of ammonia. By that time, you will need to transfer the female to a different pond where she can recover her strength. Take away 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 start culling on the sixth week. Get rid of the baby koi with deformities such as lacking fins, deformed mouths, colorless, and single color.
Culling is vital in koi breeding. You need to reduce the numbers so the good quality fry can reach a reasonable size by the end of the season. If you do not cull, the unwanted koi will still fight with the good koi for food as well as 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 continue the selection process until you get only the best koi that you would like to keep or sell.
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