Rambling About Mud Ponds, Natural Ponds and Koi Ponds

[dick benbow]

On my visits to japan, I often asked breeders when they needed to reline the banks with new clay. I was told that it differed from pond to pond according to the color the water had that year but got the sense it averaged every 3-4 years.

The last month of so, I have delved into the hobby of goldfish raising and for breeders and hobbyists alone, the big effort is to raise them even inside in aquariums in green water, which is a reall fight to do correctly. color of the green tells you when to redo the effort and if the water is browning, there are health issues in your goldfish. Struggling to come to grips with the push to have green for one member of the carp family and the push to eliminate green for another. I know there are other koi kichi's out there that are also into goldies....so why the difference? In my struggle to get caught up on the latest, I see that most of the Doers in this world are in china,Taiwan and thailand and that most up to date magazines are in that language. So I feel Stymied in advancing my knowledge. I have left threads in goldfish sites heavily participated by those from Singapor but no answers/acknowledgements.

[MikeM]

Marie: You know that old ditty about how 'everything old is new again'? Thanks for bumping up this old thread. The new posts add considerably.

Dick: Your comment about growing goldfish in green water got my attention. There are many anecdotal observations that koi raised in mud ponds with green water have better color, more even and stable Hi, and greater robustness. (Perhaps due to factors other than the green water, but the folklore tales survive.) Likewise, many of the old Niigata breeders recommended that koi with injuries, hikui, ammonia burn and other skin conditions be placed in green water ponds to be cured. (The hikui would go away, but returned after the fish was back in a clear water hobbyist pond a few months.) The green water they talked about was not thick pea soup water, but green tinted with sufficient algae growth that visibility was limited. We know, however, that green ponds are at greater risk of oxygen depletion during warm weather. We also know that when a pond turns pea soup green, there can be a sudden death spiral from nutrient depletion with all sorts of problems coming from all the decomposition... an extremely unhealthy environment. If we understood enough to be able to maintain a mildly green water environment, controlling it so the algae growth was never 'too much', we might well have the best environment for raising koi (although not for viewing the koi). But, controlling green water seems an impossibility given current knowledge. I recall many times trying and failing to produce green water as a fry food for gouramies and bettas.

Brett: Your comments have me thinking of those aerial photos of koi farms showing a dozen or more tosai ponds, each a different shade of green and some muddy brown. Side by side, but each different.

[dick benbow]

mike the goldfish kichii's in the singapore area have the green water indoor
stuff down. It's on about a week's cycle and has to be renewed with a start from the old batch. It's a tight rope, I'm told to keep up with it week after week but from those who have seen the best kept in clear and the best kept in green there is no comparison as to which is better. I'm thinking if a person wanted to go against the current inclination of bigger is better in the koi world and go back a few decades when bonsai koi was all the rage, a person couldn't be beat in baby champion category by going "green"