Dear REC, sounds very reasonable if you were correct in your basic premise. But unfortunately you couldn’t be more hoplessly wrong!
OK, only teasing – but truthfully, this whole ‘lets put koi fry in a water feature and call it a koi pond’ is not about educating the uneducated. That is like giving a fish to a starving man. No, the REAL problem is MIS-EDUCATING. You could spend the rest of your life helping one duped soul after another and the marketing machine will still be creating thousands more at the source-
The answer here is to attack the mis-education so that eventually, just like gold fish people learned over the last decade about those tiny round, non filtered gold fish bowls not being a suitable home for their newly purchased fantails, the general public will learn that it is cruel and ridiculous trying to keep adult koi in shallow, gravel covered puddles.
Here are some examples of MIS education employed by landscapers and rock bottom liner types-
Koi hibernate like the water plants in winter
Koi waste is in balance with the plants and bacteria on the rocks.
Koi should only be fed once every few days and more will harm them.
Koi and goldfish have the same requirements ( their kinda the same fish anyways? In size and requirements- NOT!)
Koi will grow normally in a rock bottom puddle. ( as if)
These are not accurate statements ( and I’m being kind stating it that way) . The industry responsible for holding back the evolution of American koi ponds will pick and choose what information ‘works’ for the presentation and avoid or counter attack any information that rains on the parade.
Recently I’ve noticed that NO cleaning because the pond is reflecting nature has now changed to cleaning twice a year. This does not mess with the business and in fact adds to it, so it is taken as a ‘new truth’. But the margin is the thing my friend- There is no higher profit and wider margin that digging a hole, laying in a liner and sump system and then filling the job with stones- So the system will naturally resist any education that compresses this profit margin.
I have no evidence or statistics but I suspect that the ‘shelf life’ of the person who installs a stone puddle for koi in their yard is about the same as the average person who buys a ten gallon aquarium. In a year or two they give up on fish because of the problems and hassle of maintenance and health issues surrounding the fish. It is NOT the ‘living picture’ they thought they were buying. And so it goes—
Best Regards, JR