estanque_koi
Koi Lover
Aug 5, 2004, 8:13 AM
Post #22 of 30
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Hi there,
my name is Diego and I live in Cordoba, Spain. I'm keeping and breeding Koi in a 5th floor terraced roof, over my flat. I'm using small doughboy swimming pools with DIY homemade barrel filters and UV clarifiers. The biggest pool or tank is 1600 liters, that is 422.7 USA gallons or 352 UK gallons (your life will be lot easier with the metric system...), with 220 liters of biofilter in three connected barrels.
The tank I have used this spring for spawning is 1350 liters (356.7 USA gallons). There were 3 males and one female (Sanke), sizes ranging from 35 to 40 cm (roughly 16 inches the biggest). If you use bigger Koi for spawning you should use a bigger breeding tank. The female, which is not big and wasn't very fat, laid around 20000 eggs, maybe up to 30000. The tank has got to siphons (diameter 2 inches) drawing water by gravity to a 250 liters biofilter, where a submersible pump takes the water to the UV clarifier and to the tank in a sort of small cascade. Some sort of plastic scouring pads placed at the shiphon's intakes partially prevented the fry being absorbed into the biofilter, although I ended up catching around 200 fry that were living safely for weeks. Additional aeration is provided by two 25 cm long air diffuser flexible tubes.
10 days after hatching there were probably between 5000 and 10000 fry. Feeding them with my Daphnia cultures was all right for a while, but they finally crashed due to overexplotation and rising temperatures. I had losses when started feeding them Artemia. Was my first time using them, and couldn't separate egg shells completely. Many fry ate egg shells and I believe they died.
Anyway, there were too many fry, and patterns started to develop so I could start culling. One month and a half after hatching I had probably around 1000 fry. Sequential culling decreased numbers to around 3000. I've been giving away a lot of small Koi, including blacks, orange, whites... Last weekend was the last culling session so far and there were around 30 to keep. It is amazing the low proportion of nice fry that one can get even using rather nice parents. You can have a look at some pictures of parents and selected babies at
http://www.koi-bito.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3426#3426
I'm afraid is a different forum, I do participate in three of them ¿rather crazy, isn't it?
Diego Jordano
Cordoba, España
Web pers. Koi and ponds (in Spanish) http://es.geocities.com/estanqueskois/
Web Spanish Koi Keeper's Society (Asociacion Espanola del Koi, AEK: http://www.elkoi.com
E-mail:djordano@wanadoo.es
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Nice backyard,very neath set up you have there.Look like you have a lot of room for your project.I recommend to buid your growing pond beforehand so you can establish it.As of spawning and hatching tank just usea portable ones and set them up next to your growing pond.That way you can remove them any time you want once you transfer the babies to the growing pond.Just wait for few weeks untill the frys are big enough to live in a filtered pond.Just an idea
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