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Keeping Koi
Whether you keep your koi in a 250 gallon patio pond or a 50,000 gallon swimming pool, much of what is done is the same. Here are some rules of thumb that will keep your koi alive longer.
1) Feed koi a little bit of a high quality food. Cheap fish foods tend to dirty the water. And koi only digest 20% of what you feed them anyway. If you mix small koi with large koi, make sure the larger fish are getting enough food.
2) Filters help. They are like bringing a bigger car to carry more people. A pond without a filter is like a micro-car. Don't expect to load it down. If you want to put a lot of fish in a small space, then increase your filter.
3) Oxygen does lots of good things. The fish love it. The bacteria that eat the fish wastes love it. Even the water loves it. So invest in a good aerator. (See Products) And a waterfall does more than look beautiful; it adds lots of oxygen..
4) Be careful when adding new fish to a system that is already running. New fish create new situations and all of them are bad. They increase the load. So the passengers in your van are cramped and overcrowded. And if one of your new arrivals has a cold, the rest of the passengers are sure to catch it. A few tips to help ease the stress:
B. Feed less for two weeks.
C. Quarantine the new arrivals.
5) Good water is the key to successful koi keeping. And the higher the quality of koi, the better quality of water you will need.
6) The difference between a so-so koi keeper and a very good koi keeper is both the quality of their fish and how long the koi keeper keeps the koi alive. Koi can easily live fifteen to twenty years. And some bloodlines don't mature until after ten years of age. So set your goals high.
A. If you can keep koi alive for more than five years, you are a good koi keeper.
B. Taisho Sankes and Showa Sankes are the most difficult fish to keep alive. Raising these koi puts pressure on even the most advanced koi keeper. So if you feel confident try your hand at these wonderful animals. The changes they go through over ten years is what makes keeping koi such a rewarding endeavor.
C. Raising small babies, ten inches or less, to adulthood, thirty inches or more, is the ultimate in koi keeping skills, especially if they are Sanke. These tiny animals are incredibly beautiful and unbelievably delicate.
7) A few tips on doctoring koi to help you kill the parasite, not the fish.
A. Keep the treatment simple.
C. Remember that the higher the quality or the younger the fish, the less chance there is for error. It's very easy to over-medicate these animals.
D. Select only really healthy fish from really healthy water. This saves you a lot of work and heartache in the future.
8) When adding city water (or tap water), let it drip into the pond over a long period of time. The fish like it better and if you forget to turn off the hose, you avoid disaster.
9) A good bucket and a good net. Knocking scales off koi is opening the door to infection.
10) Koi are coldblooded. They need slow adjustments. Part of koi keeping is learning patience. The saying: "Haste makes waste," is the perfect watchword for all koi keepers.
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