Koi Fish Breeding
Koi Fish Breeding
Koi breeding might seem an easy adventure when you first look at it. Just put two koi together and you get thousands of koi! We wish it was that easy.
Our farms mission is to supply a high grade, healthy, affordable koi into the koi fish market. To achieve this, it takes a lot of knowledge, time and money.
We first start with our breeder koi. Just like other breeding, you must obtain breeders of the highest quality that you can afford. These parents will set the bar of the possible quality you will be able to produce. Our koi parent stock is imported from Japan from one of the world top koi breeders, Mr. Toshio Sakai of the Matsunosuke blood line. These parents are chosen for specific genetic traits they carry. The breeder must know how to pair each set of males and females together to get the best ratio of these special chosen traits to come together on their offspring.
The breeder then must understand the breeding environment. Water quality, insects and unstable temperatures are just a few factors that can cause a breeding to fail.
Once the fry have successfully hatched, the breeder wants to be sure there is ample food in the pond for the fry. A good diet for the fry will quickly get the fry to the 1 1/2in they need to be for their first culling.
Culling, this is the most skillful part of koi breeding. The breeder looks at each and every koi for the specific traits he bred for. They are not easily seen at such a small size and the breeder has to use his knowledge from past breedings with the parent koi, to help interpret the traits he is seeing will develop as the koi grows.
Choosing the wrong koi can have a very negative effect. Keeping koi that shouldn’t have made the grade, means that the cost of feeding and labor are going into koi that the koi can not return. Culling out a potential award winning koi is part of the challenge to becoming an expert koi breeder.
Breeding for a hobbyist can be a fun and a great learning experience. Watching how koi develop from fry can help a hobbyist understand how traits on the koi you are purchasing may develop.
