Kaven
Koi Lover
Feb 7, 2003, 3:28 AM
Post #1 of 4
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Colouring of Fries
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Hi forumers,
I am a newbie to the koi hobby and also to this site. However I have a few questions maybe some of you chaps here can help.
I purchased 8 kois (5 -6 inch) just 3 months back. About 1 month back I found lots and lots of little tiny fishes in the pond (small 40 x 30 inch pond half-moon shape in the front of house). As the pond also contains water lilies and lotus plants, I find it quite difficult to see all the tiny fishes. Reading somewhere that that koi's eat anything its month can put inside, I was quite concerned that all the fries will be gobbled up. Hence, maybe out of my concern for the small chaps in there, I took some 15 fries (about half the length of my small fingernail each) out from the pond and put it into a small aquarium which I set up with a simple Eheim filter and change water regularly.
Now there are only 5 surviving members of which the largest is around slightly less than half an index finger long and others not far off.
What I find interesting is that these fries kept in the home aquarium are not brightly coloured at all - the largest being fully shiny silvery in colour (when I captured this one it has more colour) and others only very slightly orange while some with some slight orange and black lines. All the colours are not deep. I feed them multitude of food from processed fry food - powder form, to dried tubifex worm and ground morsels of dried brine shrimp.
In contrast, in my pond, I noticed that there are at least 10-15 (that I can easily count) of those same generation fries which survived living in the same pond with the parents and are now much larger - maybe 3/4 of an index finger long and I did not even feed them fry food at all (only feed adult koi food like koi sticks) Their colouration are DEEP Red/Orange Colours or Deep Red and Black colour. All their colours are very strong and look very elegant - much like their parents. (Another side thing to note is that when I bought the original parent koi's (local variety) from the aquarium their colours were not very deep and the fish looks just OK but now they are very deep in colour and have grown quite a bit, around 1 1/2 times their original size - 50% larger).
My question are the following:
a) why are the colour so different between those fries in the pond and in the aquarium?
b) Will those in the aquarium change colour to be similar to those in the pond once I put them back into the pond?
c) I can't understand why those in the pond grow much faster when I feed those in the aquarium very well?
Side Note: I now find another set of new small fries in the pond just two days ago (very small) - the larger koi's are surely very active.
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