Kohaku|Koi Selection ·Nov 30, 2015

Nissai selection 2015

I've been back from Japan for just over a month, and it's been a very hectic period. It took me around a week to get over the jet lag; never suffered like that before, and it was probably a combination of jet lag plus recovery from a week of sleep deprivation.

Work's been full on, and it's only over the last week or so that I've been able to spend a bit of weekend time in the polytunnel sorting out a few things koi.

By way of a status update :-

- males tank ticking along nicely; this is unheated and we swapped the food to coppens health a few weeks ago. Found this worked really well in the cooler temps at the start of this year and I saved a bag of it for the autumn period and we're using that now.

- females tank is still heated, to around 22/23. On the cooler days we had last week, the tank temp dropped by a degree or two. The females are filling out, and they look in good health.

- the growing on tanks have been ticking along at 23/24, and we've started feeding coppens top koi. still being hand fed... at some point, I'll get the auto feeders set up. There was a problem with the tank while I was in Japan... And, by the time I got back, Amanda had sorted the problem by taking the salinity up to just under 0.9% for a week. Anyway, the long and short of it it... we lost around 15 of the May 15 fry, and a large proportion of the late summer spawning fry from Elle.. They were so small, that whatever it was that wreaked havoc, took hold fast and we know from experience that you have to act quickly when looking after fry that small. the good news is that we didn't lose many of the May 15 fry, and the nissai that are also in the growing on system were hardly affected, I'm out of tank space, so moved the rest of Elles fry into the green vortex tank which isn't ideal, because they are sharing it with some of the May 15 fry... and are being out competed... Thing is, there just weren't enough fry from Elle's spawning to warrant me using a whole tank to grow them on - so we'll see if any make it through the winter without being eaten by the May 15 fry.. I liked what I saw from her fry at the 1 inch stage. and I'll give Elle a proper go next year, probably in May 16.

The main news is that I've been through all the tosai that I've been growing in the females tank; they've turned nissai now, having completed their second summer. I selected 7 nissai to move to the growing on tank, to add to the 10 nissai that I moved into that tank a couple of months ago. That makes 17 nissai that I am growing on over the winter in one of the growing on tanks.

We caught them up a couple of weeks ago, and took video, pictures and measurements of each one - as a record that we can refer back to. I've number the nissai and have been asking people to give me their ideas on which ones will develop the best over the next year and beyond.