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another two cents worth if i may, colour in fish is there for one reason, survival. in some fish its to be noticed, but as in koi i suspect it is best in a natural situation to go un-noticed.
what happens if i let out a heap of coloured koi and brown koi into an un-netted pond and the birds come in?
all the coloured get eaten/die and the brown survive!!!
its us humans that pull out the coloured and make them safe enough to survive in this world.
a fish that blends in with its environment has less chance of being eaten.
nature has put the ability in koi and many fish to produce offspring with many differing colours so that if # for example they all get trapped in one pool and its got orange leaves overhanging it in autum, then maybe it wont get eaten by an eagle trying to score a feed.
natures done a job good in case nature puts yellow leaves out one year.. or no leaves out or green algae or brown algae or black rock bottom with small patched of red or white rocks and red algae on them or even black rocks with large patched of red.
its just an example but thats basically how it goes.
it is remarkable that colour in such a fish as koi has even stood the test of time, it has not been removed from the gene pool, then again maybe its not that it has remained but more so atleast that its remarkable that it has developed to where it was at a colour when man could look at it!!!
all big native freshwater species of fish round my way are DULL and for a good reason.
somewhere along the line it was not so good for a koi in its day to only be brown.. any hint of colour probably began with what we wouldve seen as a deformity-a change from the ussual, then the pigments went even further on their way.. i rephrase- were ALLOWED to go even further.. its amazing really, i looked yesterday at all the different hues that little salt water crabs have from brown mottled ones, purples, greens, they look like the surrounding mud and leaves and roots..
with koi we have that kindof thing right through to the briliant colours we have now, whether it be casual, gradual all over or even stark two tones. we as humans go for something that strikes our attention.. something we could see in the dark ourselves. something symetrical unusual or pretty.
nature is more used to hiding from things that have much better night vision than us.
we see a fish thats nice, we grab it and then look for another and the next fish goes hahhahaah you cant catch me!!! i win again. you go somewhere else for a feed. YOU GO SOUTH, YOU GO BAD.
throw in a heap of humans wanting all the same fish and yes up goes the price!!
fish that survive, well they live to breed another day and genes dictate that most likely its offspring will have a chance at hiding under such conditions also.
BUT!!!! and so the big question is why is it so hard to reproduce what we want??
why is there throwbacks??
its in case some trend doesent work for too long. and this comes from the way a gene is and how its outcomes are when it crosses with a fish that lived up the stream a kilometre or fifty or from a different country and seperated by 40 years and what?? 12 generations..only.
so this is why there is so much crapegois and still what we consider a good fish will still produce them crappy koi.
take a typical kohaku, breed from it and it will throw white, reddy orange, orange, red white.. whatever.
the kohaku that i had, that had the deepest most best red i ever saw got eaten by a dog in a wheelbarrow, five minutes before i paired it up to breed it. that sucked!
"your whites not like snow anymore, the heads wrong, it needs to be bigger.. the list goes on."
there is so much to keep a handle on.
i think that we are trying to compress it very quickly and thus getting rather dissapointed and sometimes yes, we over do it.
ask how many fish have been produced to come up with the five best examples you have seen! we have a bench mark that is very, extremely RARE.
sure it is a great thing what has been done so far but it is not to the point where all things that we want can be there and be stabilised to much degree nor expect it to be held in that frozen state or to choose a young fish and have it come good later. if so we could be happy with thousands of our offspring.
take a think about whats been culled in our aims, take a think of whats still being culled and take a thing about what will be culled still in 50 years from now.
now ill come back to why i mention this.
i dont see why we will EVER be able to remove such variance for definate. if we could it would take a hell of a long time. not in our lifetime because NATURE ITSELF has not removed it.
there are TWO GENES FOR EVERYTHING!!
yes you can produce a steady phenotype if you are looking for something.
somethings are hidden there, waiting to show later.
choose the right fish and you may find some steady characteristic showing.
unless you know each fishes phenotype and the hidden possibility and that of the fish you will mate it with you are poking around only. you can poke around and win. for sure. you can observe and manage breeding and win more.
problem is here.
take another twenty desirable characteristics and your about screwed.
take a heap of differing veiw points on whats good now and whats acceptable in the future and your in for a headache of sorts. look at fashion and how it dont just keep us warm or protected from the sun.
this all adds up and thus poses a problem for anyone wanting to spend lots of money on a fish and hope it will hold its fine qualities for years and then pass them on also to its offspring. which i spose is also why a breeder that has experience can take out some guesswork and we will pay greatly for this.
take a look at all the variance in the way a scale can look, how its colour can be sharp, blend,diamond, big, small, scaleless.. whatever.
oh yeh and the layering of pigments, the veining........................
geez we look hard.
have a look for all the different koi that arent exactly exactly identical!
look at how a fish that can be sold for big bucks can go downhill to the point it looks like its sister that got culled or a wallmart fish.
it seems to me we are asking for a lot to have all our desires show in a fish.
then on top of that we wish it to stay that way and to breed that way. breed true.
still almost 100% culls going on all over and still we say we need to improve.
i spose its better than going to war.
why would nature offer a fool proof system of surviving?
cause it wouldnt be here otherwise..
why would it offer a system where a scale is to be red and the next one white in such an abrupt way and make it easy to be stablised?
even with breeding such fish, they will produce blending colours in the scale, especially when you are also looking for a nice head, body, tail, fins.
this is why even the best fish mated with the best fish now, or in ten years will not produce really really stable offspring all worth a heap of dollars, all worth equal veiwing.
keep this, keep this, keep this keep this...
we are trying to choose and isolate so many different genes to make us happy but NATURE KNOWS BEST and by its very nature will pick up and throw out this desire of ours anyday.
it almost makes me want to kiss and thank the one ive got.
it takes much longer. imagine breeding for a fat body while holding all the other things we want. imagine using a huge fish cause its genetic allows 1m koi but then losing just one of the other things that you selected for and having to work six years to get it back let alone stable and then you can only keep two of these fish healthy in your backyard pond but yeh sure are impressive beasts..except that every blemish is bigger now.
to me i can see there is a set of standards when selecting a show fish, i bet this has changed a lot over time from the days when the first guy came home yelling about his red koi but still id bet that some that come out now look just like that one.
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