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Things You Should Know About Koi Breeding
Koi breeding is hard if what you want is to produce high-quality fish for competition reasons. Before you can have a prize-winning koi fish, you will have to cull and discard several thousand fry. The koi breeding process is long and difficult but it is all worth it.
Selecting 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 research more on the sort of offspring you're most likely to get. Just remember that the dominant genes are those from the male parent.
Be sure to use only adult fish for breeding applications. The appropriate breeding age of the female is from 5 years forward as their eggs are larger and more fertile. Watch out for breeding females under the age of 4 years old as your koi could 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, aiming to clear a place where she can place her eggs.
Male koi can start spawning upon reaching the age of two as soon as small white nodules show up on the pectoral fins and gill plates. You can actually feel those areas to be rougher than usual. You can utilize the younger males every two weeks but give a lengthier 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 eaten by the other fish while the females get more stressed. The net outcome will be offspring of bad quality. Moreover, a pond filled with eggs will harbor harmful bacteria that will negatively affect the health of your koi population.
If you are serious in koi breeding, you will have to use a controlled approach. Put the koi brooders in a different pond and be sure to hang spawning media from the walls of the pond. The female will have them to place her eggs which can be anywhere 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 materials.
During courtship, the male pursues the female and forces her towards the walls of the pond to induce spawning. If there are two or even three males in the pond, they will group on her to simultaneously fertilize the eggs.
You will know that the Koi have spawned when there is foam on the water surface and the distinct scent of ammonia. By that time, you will need to transfer the female to another pond where she can recover her strength. Take away the males too; otherwise, they may feed on the eggs.
Culling
The fry will break out of their eggshells in 5 to 7 days. They will keep on growing and you can start culling on the sixth week. Get rid of the baby koi with deformities like lacking fins, deformed mouths, colorless, and single color.
Culling is crucial 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 don't cull, the unwanted koi will still fight with the good koi for food and also 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 natural food. As they grow bigger, you can continue the selection process until you get only the ideal koi that you would like to keep or sell.
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