Late summer '17 spawning

The late summer '17 spawning has been a challenge. We ran out of warm weather earlier than usual at the end of last year's summer and we couldn't keep our heated tanks as warm as we would have liked over the winter with various issues that I've talked about previously.

The end result is these kohaku are smaller than I'd like, and the knock on effect is we are behind in the selections too.

Yesterday, we performed what I think is, third selection. And we're finally down to around 70 kohaku which have some potential.

These kohaku are from my trusty okawa female - and i mixed in my sakai male with one of the dianichi males to try something slightly different with the spawning. Based on the selection yesterday, I haven't seen much of a difference in the fry compared to her babies on previous years when I used just the dianichi males. Perhaps too early to tell. And it may be that the majority of the fertilisation work was done by the dianichi male. These are the challenges with breeding koi, with the natural spawning approach!

Tank space is very much an issue for this spawning, because in less than 2 months I will need their tank to start growing on the 2018 fry.

The plan is to continue growing these 70 koi on for another month, perhaps 6 weeks. Then take another look. if I run out of tank space, I may have to release fish easier than I would have liked and will strike it down to experience.







And here's some video of them:


Video link: https://youtu.be/JC8whoeJC3M


The other job we managed to fit in yesterday was to split across two tanks, the 160 or so middle sized tosai growing on from Rosie's May 2017 spawning. We got a chance to have a closer look at these koi during the process, and overall I'm really happy with their development. I'm piling in the food at the moment and they're looking a little rounded as a result! I'm not worried about that and check out the shoulder volume on many of them which bodes well.

Half of these have gone in with the 70 smaller koi from the late summer '17 spawning. And the other half have a tank to themselves. And we've done this to maximise the growth potential in their last few weeks of growing on.

In 3 weeks time, we have Witham Valley Koi Club (WVKC) visiting us and they've asked us to supply them with a batch of fish for a grow and show. So in around 2 weeks time we will start our final tosai selections to prepare for the WVKC grow and show. Some of the fish we'll use for their grow and show will come from this batch.... and some will come from the larger tosai we're growing on in the rectangular tank.






And here's some video of them:


Video Link: https://youtu.be/BqhzUI-W2Rs