Friday 25th April 2008.
This morning I transported the chagoi and yamabuki sets from home to the farm. My parent koi are not kept at the farm, the main reason for this is to ensure that there is a nice water chemistry change between their general 'living' pond and the pond which they will breed in. This is part of the 'trigger' which is needed to induce natural spawning, another I use is to make sure I put the koi into cooler water than their home pond. In the wild, carp time their breeding to coincide with heavy rain fall, this can often lead to high water levels, even flooding, they can sense the lowering in air pressure leading up to thunder storms.
The reason for carp and koi spawning at these times is because this influx of new water always, a little while after brings a hatch of insect life feeding off the increase in nutrients from ground run off. I cannot reproduce the lowering of air pressure, but the difference in water chemistry makes the big trigger for me. You may have noticed at koi shows you often see spawnings in the show vats on the second day, this is the trigger of water chemistry change just the same as I use.
So onto the present action, the two sets of koi, one female chagoi and yamabuki and two males of each were placed into the spawning nets at 8.30am this morning. Fingers crossed as normal, but this early in the season is often a hit and miss situation for breeding, it's not the natural time, as this would be in a month or so. I hope I have kept the koi at the correct temperature and have given enough artificial light for them to believe it is the correct time for breeding?
This is the female Yamabuki with the males.
I've not measured her in years, but she is 80something cm.
She has a fairly slim frame at the moment as I have wintered the adults hard this year and the females have not had time to regain the weight. This will restrict the number of eggs produced, but a yamabuki of this size will always give me far too many babies. In the middle of summer I expect she would produce anything up to 400,000 eggs! I settle for 150,000 to 200,000 for now!
This is 'mummy' chagoi, worth her weight in gold to me.
One of the best you will ever see, purchased in Japan in 2000 as Sansai (3 years old).
Both these females have lived in a 2,500 gallon pond inside my fish house since 2000 and attained tremendous growth considering. I hope they do not grow too much more, as lifting larger koi becomes very difficult and dangerous.
For those who follow the activities of the Zebra finches and canaries, there has been a mass exodus! Last night as I was leaving through the back door, I found a male canary sat on the Barbeque outside, just a little surprised I managed to position myself and with a little waving of the arms, back in he flew.
But today I noticed we are down to only 7 Zebra finches. I don't know how or what, but some seem to have escaped.