Breeding koi is not for the faint hearted and the weekend breeder. This is a tedious time-consuming process and there is no guarantee you will have stunning baby koi teeming in the koi pond. Koi breeding is also a mix of your high school biology and math, and very expensive.
Still Interested?
If others can do it, why can’t you? Then you are still interested to try your luck in breeding these expensive and beautiful fish. Before buying koi for breeding, be honest about your capability to breed this fish.
Parent fish for starters are expensive because you want prize-winning babies. Maybe you have not heard that professional breeders spend as much as ten thousand dollars on a single fish! Well, you can start any way the $500 fish.
You will need a female koi and two male koi. Roughly translated that is $1,500 and be double the amount if you want the more expensive specie for quality offspring. When you buy these breeders, you must have a koi pond ready for the experiment. You need the right koi fish food and the perfect breeding environment and one that will not cause koi disease. There are indeed a thousand and one other essentials to koi breeding.
Breeding Basics
To get beautiful baby koi, you must match two equally beautiful parents. The prettier the parents, the more expensive they are. The fish will be ready to mate mid-spring through summer.
They males will be chasing the female and when the female is ready to lay her eggs, she will look for a nice spot. Be ready with nylon breeding ropes. The female’s eggs will attach to the nylon threads. Remove the nylon and place in a separate tank lest the parents eat the eggs.
Caring for the Fries
Watching the eggs hatch into little fries and then developing into little replicas of their parents is truly exciting and rewarding. But it takes extra care to care for the eggs and the fries.
The nylon ropes should be immersed in koi water and you have to be extra careful that the water in the incubator is devoid of chlorine and toxic metals. The water has to be treated too with anti-fungus formula because fungus can eat up all the eggs.
To aerate the incubating tank, place the tank below a faucet and let the water trickle or you can use an aerator specially designed for incubators. Water temperature should be warm enough for faster hatching, warmer than the recommended temperature the eggs are fried.
Feeding the fries is something else. They have not developed their taste buds yet so they have to be tempted with visions of food floating on top. At this stage, they have already weaned themselves from the sac and need air.
Food for the fries is something else. They like brine shrimp and powder-form fish food. With constant feeding, you need to clean the tank to get rid of toxic compounds. With the proper attention given to koi breeding and the care of fries, you can continue with the next batch of koi breeding next spring.
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