BranMuffin
Koi Kichi
Nov 23, 2003, 8:55 AM
Post #2 of 4
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Re: [pisces222] Should I buy Tosai?
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Let's start out by saying that under controlled breeding, a female koi can have as many as 250,000 eggs. About 1/4 of that will not get fertilized, that leaves about 187,500 that are and turn into fry's. That's a lot of fry's! Some of these little fry's turns out to be (I believe the term they use is Toby) Tobies which are nothing more than large junk fish, which btw will kill some of the weaker and smaller fish. These gets culled asap and thrown out. About 2-4 weeks later, you can begin to see some patterns on these little guys and lot's of them will be plain colored fish. Through experience, the top breeders will know if these are Ogons or Shiromuji's (plain white fish), and these are generally tossed out except for a very few. But NOT all white fish are junk fish, some of them have the potential of becoming a Kohaku .. it takes a trained eye to spot these and not throw them out.
A couple more weeks and they can determine if the little guys will actually have patterns or turn out pure color: i.e. Black, Brown, which are your Magoi's and Chagois and the majority of them are thrown out.
A few more weeks and the other colors come up such as the Hi and Sumi patterns, and from these patterns they will cull out the ones with real crummy patterns (usually sold to retail outlets (such as K-mart) as pond or ornamental koi). The left overs are the one's that have potential in them to become something more than a Pond or Ornamental fish.
A few more weeks after that then they begin to segregate the one's that have potentials to become "Show Ready Fish" and these are the ones that are placed in Mud Ponds (about 1000 or so). The one's that do not go into the mud ponds are then sold to other Koi dealers in bulk.
The Mud ponds DOESN'T guarantee that all the fish that were put there will come out great looking. As a matter of fact, after some of them dies of uncontrollable diseases, parasites, deterioration and predators, only about 30% of them come out that can be sold for top dollar ...and only 10% of that are potential Champions and Grand Champions which are sold to the Elites for many many thousands of dollars. We're talking $10,000 and above.
There's more to this culling than meets the eye (or that I have outlined here) and it takes years and years of breeding and culling before one can really understand how to cull. I have some idea on how it's done, but even then ... I still wind up with 95% junk! I've been into koi for 25+ years, but just playing around with your Pond fish and tinkering around with breeding will NOT give you the experience to really know your stuff.
Hope this explains some of why breeders cull their fry's. Who wants to end up with a bunch of Big Junk Fish?
You want to buy a fish that's fairly stable. Go with koi that are 2 years or older and 16" and above for Kohakus, Sankes and just about all other fish except Showas, Bekko's and Utsuri's ... then buy the one's that are 3 years old and above and 20" and above. But be ready to spend a few more bucks for these.
Best Regards
Bran
A Koi Pond is never FINISHED, it's always subject to improvement.
Drives the Spouse Crazy!
(This post was edited by BranMuffin on Nov 23, 2003, 9:11 AM)
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