Elk Grove Koi

Each indoor grow out tank has both a gravel and an additional external filter. I never clean both filters the same day but alternate cleaning days.

These swim-up koi fry need to be feed about every two hours and tanks need to be cleaned every three days. We also hatch brine shrimp eggs and feed them live food a few times a day.

Now we have 40,000 baby koi fry and no mud pond to grow them in. How and what do we feed them?

Just a sidebar...always dip the brushes with the eggs in a weak malachite green solution to stop fungus from attacking the infertile eggs and spoiling the whole spawn.

Here are some four day old koi fry that I'm moving into another aquarium. Again, I hatch the eggs in one tank but because there are so many fry I split them up into 6 different indoor tanks and two outdoor tanks. Just an educated guess but I'm thinking I got over 40,000 fry out of the kujaku spawn. Tomorrow the lemon hariwaki eggs will start to hatch.

I hatch most of the eggs in a 125 gallon aquarium in the house. After 3 days the eggs hatch and the babies attach to the glass sides of the tank. Because the unhatched eggs can quickly foul the water I remove the spawning brushes and do a quick cleaning of the aquarium gravel before the koi fry start swimming around the tank. Always use dechlor when adding replacement water.

You can see the eggs on the spawning brushes in this photo. The clear or translucent eggs are fertile and the white or opaque eggs are not fertile

I've been asked many times how many eggs do your koi spawn? The short answer is, a five pound koi will produce about 500,000 eggs of which maybe 75% will be fertile. When I spawn my fish I only keep the eggs that wind up on the spawning brushes. I wouldn't have room for spawns from two or three different females if I tried to keep them all.

The second spawn for 2011 is a female lemon hariwaki with 2 male hariwaki's and again just to make things interesting added a beautiful yamabuki ogon male to the mix.

Did two differnet spawns this year, kujaku's one female with 2 different kukaku males and just to make it interesting added a beautiful gromo male.

All of our small koi are sold for the year. Getting ready to spawn the lemon hariwaki female you see to the left. First 80 degree day I'll put her in with 3 different males.

Elk Grove Koi will be posting photos of large koi forsale in the next few weeks. We currently have lots of small koi for sale now at 10.00 each or 12 for 100.00

Our back yard koi at night