The Koi Fish Guide

Though associated with Japan by a vast majority of the sections involved in specializing in ‘Koi Fish’, a much more practical way of associating them is to think of them as a ‘colored carp’ which could be of a vast range of verities as Prussian carp, German carp, silver carp, leather carp, scale carp, mirror carp, king carp, French carp, Carassius vulgaris, and Cyprinus carpio communis and normally capable of living in ponds or 55 gallons fresh water aquariums.

Taking care of Koi Fish

Koi roughly translates into ‘living jewel’ which makes it clear that growing of the fish’ Koi’, belonging to the family of Cyprinidae and having a scientific name and other name as ‘Carpio’ and ornamental ‘Carp’ respectively is an artistic discipline. The fundamental rule for you as a caring rearer of them is that a ‘koi’ belongs to the pond rather than to a person.

Take care to design your pond or aquarium well and you would have initiated the first step in taking care of them. Many Americans may not relish this but yet it is necessary to mention it in the well being of the Koi fish in which they would be interested that they do not discharge their responsibility of ‘culling’ a baby ‘koi’ carefully and the culling ensures that the most beautiful one survives.

In simple terms, culling involves removing undesirable individual ‘koi’ from the stock. There are multifarious reasons for this and some of the important ones are that there could be a sexual imbalance in the ratio between the males and the females (few of them survive long enough to carry out reproduction functions) or few of them have some deformities and the obvious question is “how do we find this to take effective action”? Well, the odd behavior of such ones would to spot them. Take for instance when a Koi fails to display its traditional beauty or swim with a funny kind of tilt, then you know that it needs to be culled, taken out of the group of fish.

Further, as a loving breeder of Koi fish, it maybe of interest for you to know that it could be difficult for you to know how many Koi are in your pond at a given point of time, but it may be easier to spot if anyone is missing and the best way to accomplish this is by naming them as you would have named your other pets as dog or cats as would do your other pets as a dog or a cat as they are as conscious and intelligent as human beings except that they cannot talk and they may surpass human being if only they have been conferred with this faculty.

An adult when grown fully reaches a size of 90cms (3feet) and lives in a temperature between 65 and 75 Fahrenheit and achieves sexual capability when it grows a minimum of 25 cms (10″). In Koi, the ovaries are much larger than the testes and it is relatively easier to spot the females because of the plumpness of their bellies than males which are torpedo shaped.

They are omnivorous meaning they eat animal flesh, though they can take, contrary to perceptions prevailing among a section of their growers, vegetarian food as bread crumbs as well. Their diet would need larger amplification and hence would not be covered here.

Though they are individualistic yet do not exhibit unsociable characteristics and at least one interesting combination evidencing this could be found in having a mix of two smoky angelfish, two marble angelfish, one golden koi angelfish, one red jewel cichlid, two eclectic yellow cichlid, one comet sarsa fish, 1 cae Chinese algae eater and one pleco.