Question

[koifishgirl]

Can you take a kohaku from a mass spawn and spawn with another kohaku from mass spawn and still come up with mostly kohaku fry?

[dick benbow]

how do you ever find your dogs in the snow? (lol)



Kohaku that breed 100% true usually come from a background of kohaku to kohaku thru 10 generations. I think your use of the word "mostly" is key here and the answer would be yes.....

[gregbickal]

Can you ever really know if you got a purebred, or a... "it looks like a kohaku now, but last year it was a Sanke"

[dick benbow]

Greg-fair question! A while back when matsunosuke sanke's were all the rage, I wanted something with less black. So I had a breeder show me the difference of what the eye cere on a sanke and kohaku look like. I went thru 100 kohaku look alikes knowing some were culled from a sanke/kohaku cross. So I do know there is a way to tell if a kohaku has sanke leanings. It will be difficult to explain without examples but in an effort to educate

look at the circle of skin...I call it the eye cere...that outlines the eyeball per say....usually with kohaku it's a bluish tint, with sanke you can see the dark gray/black showing thru the eye cere.....


BTW, the first year no black showed, the second year it came in but looked more like bigger shimmie and my experiment failed (miserably) your right tho had i been after a kohaku i would have also been miserably disappointed...hence the reasoning it might be better to pay for something you know what your getting....

[bekko]

Someone once posted these photos and I saved them. They were originally at a better resolution, but you can still see the difference. Unfortunately, I did not save the name of the person who provided this excellent comparison. It was probably James R., but I'm not sure. My apologies for not knowing.




Kohaku breed more true than any other variety except for magoi. You can find kohaku in any spawn, even when neither of the parents are kohaku.

Still, its a numbers game and to maximize the percentages of usable fish, you want to match broodstock as much possible.

-steve hopkins

[koifishgirl]

Ok now I was just told a few days ago that if a kohaku has a blue tint to the eye cover it has was from a Sanke and Kohaku cross, that the true kohaku have only white The black being Sanke. Now I am confused.

Thanks as I have a small kohaku that I was thinking about crossing and was wondering if I would come up with a lot of kohaku fry. Im thinking about mass spawning most of my koi and putting last years spawn in the pond after the spawn and use this as fish food for last years spawn. They are going to spawn anyway since I dont plan to seperate them. This past years fry did not grow well because the parent were to small to start with so they will be able to eat the eggs or the fry and give them a good jump this season. Most are only about 4 inches long and figure this will give them some live and eggs full of protein to get started out with this spring.

Sanke to Sanke spawns will produce what oher than sanke and kohaku?

Judy

[koifishgirl]

Dick, Jack calles them polar bears all the time. That is something I would like to see, we dont have snow here much in the south but I bet it would be hard to see them if they were not in the pen. If it snows this winter I 'll get a pic to post and see if you can find them.


Judy

[elunned]

Both statements are true. The fern-like pattern around the eye is a better indicator of bloodline than blue eyebrows. (Thanks to JR for that lesson!) True genetic kohaku lack the ability to produce melanin - the black pigment. You can see the melanin through the skin around the eye in some koi from the top. What Dick calls eye ceres I call eyelids or eyebrows, they are easy to spot from bridges or pondside. It is a great party trick

I have a kohaku with blue eyebrows in my pond whose mom was a sanke. He developed shimmis as he got older - another indicator of melanin. No sanke in the wood-pile means no shimmi surprises.

Sanke to sanke also produce bekko plus tons of higoi, shiromuji, black babies and halloween mutts. FWIW, I'm not sure I follow your plan. Mature koi (ie not tobis) don't usually eat fry. Fry need small live food (infusoria) plus protection from predators like dragon-fly larva. What is your goal?

[koifishgirl]

They eat eggs and these koi are only about 4 inches so I was thinking that they would eat the small fry that hatched also.

[bekko]

My koi eat fry (guppy, koi, whatever) until they are about 8 inches.

When was that spawn? June? Four inches in five months is not great, but not a complete disaster either.

There is truth in the old saw that small parents make small eggs, and small eggs do not get off to a good start in life. However, the effect is more likely to manifest itself as poor larval survival and may not be a significant factor in slow overall growth over a five-month period. Parent age and genetics are sort of the fine-tuning aspects. If overall growth during the first season is poor, then its more likely because they are not eating enough. Its could be that the pond is not mature, there is little or no natural productivity, and the lack of forage is not being compensated for with enough pellets. It could also be that dissolved oxygen stays too low, too much of the time, and they have no appetite.

Oxygen management and energy-efficient aeration is, perhaps, the most important factor in mud pond management. If a fish farmer is not anguishing over oxygen concentrations, then there is a good chance that they are either (1) wasting a lot of electricity or (2) heading towards a crop loss. You need to be measuring oxygen at dawn throughout the summer until you get a feel for what's going on. You don't need saturation at dawn, but would like to have 50%. Winter oxygen concentrations will not tell you much about what to expect when Dog Days arrive.

-steve