500 000 new showa arrive at EmeraldKoi...

[dizzyfish]

For worth is worth I had a showa spawning this year. I put one male showa in the pool and one male kohaku, with a large female showa. I got about half black fry and half whitish fry. The black fry have developed into showa and shiro utsuri. The whitish ones turned into mostly kohaku and solid orange or solid white. There are several tancho kohaku. Surprisingly there were very few sanke. Due to limited space I only raised a few hundred from this spawn. Some are turning very good red and white colors.

I also got some eggs from the winning kohaku female in the Louisville koi show. It spawned in the show tank with a showa male. Unfortunately the male trashed the female after spawning and I heard the female died on the way home. I'm not trying to hijack the thread but I just wanted Don (kohaku owner) to know there was not one single showa fry in the entire spawn. The tiny fry were either white or red looking. The red end up being almost solid red. The best of the spawn by far was the white ones which turned into mostly kohaku, with several tanchos in the mix. Once again with this spawn there were almost no sanke after 3-months. I made the mistake of trying to rear too many in one pool and the growth rate was too slow for those. I put some into a pool above my 27,000-gallon pond and they grew nromally. The nice part about raising showa is you can cull the non-black ones at a very early age. I think you could also cull the red ones when raising kohaku at a very early age. This sure would reduce the numbers.

As a footnote, I will say I'm very glad I kept some of the white fry from my first showa/kohaku/showa cross. I ended up with some excellent kohaku. I wish I knew for sure if the showa I ended up with only came from the showa/showa in the pool, or if the showa/kohaku pairing produced showa fry as well. Like I said I was very surprised that Don's showa/kohaku spawn produced zero showa.
Mitch

[PapaBear]

Spawning YIELDS tell the tale of the genetic pairing, which is what the Japanese learned long ago. A Showa pairing that produces few if any Showa fry isn't worth repeating. The light colored fry are a crapshoot of recessive genes that are difficult to predict, with a low yield of marketable Koi of any type.
Mitch's surprizing results from the Koi Show spawning are a great example of just how unpredictable a pairing can be. I would have expected a pretty fair number of Sanke, but if it is a Kindai Showa paired with a Kohaku the Kohak influence on the gene pairs took over and won the day.

[dizzyfish]

Givng thread back to EmeraldKoi.

[EmeraldKoi]

Ok, thanks for all the comments.

About the crapagoi ... well when they hatch I will fertilise the yard with them. (except for the black fry). This evening I have had a good look in the hatchery, and have spotted one fry swimming about, so they should hatch in numbers soon.

On the amount of work to cull them, well, guess what i'm doing this weekend. And the wife too. And the kids. And the friends who dont call call my fish crapagoi. (Thats only one of them). And the neighbour if I can rope her in.

The light fry from true showa spawning are usually bad kohaku at best, but I did keep 1000 or so of them last year to see what became of them. I will not do that again in a hurry, most of them, over half, were pinkish white with red marks on the head. They dont become tancho, I kept all the best ones and only got one or two who kept the colour of the tancho.

I have never used this pair before, so I dont know what to expect, but the line is there, so I have some high hopes. By Friday I will be able to estimate the percentage of black fry. I'm just worried that the amonia gets them before they get to be sorted. That happened to me many times before, and I have to work in the week so they have to survive till the weekend at least. I have been changing water, and have vigorous established filtration going on, but the amonia is pretty rough all the same, and as the eggs that dont hatch rot it just gets worse.

Yesterday I also spawned my Utsuri female with two Showa males for utsuri babies. I have used this pair a lot before and they are proven, so I'm happy with that.

The Goshiki male did his thing today, but not with the goshiki female unfortunately. I popped him in with a Koromo, so we will see what happens there, although the goshiki female is still on standby (or swimby or liedown or whatever). Then its just the kohaku and perhaps a few of the other fat koi for a source of food for them in a fortnight or so.

Ill keep you all posted when I get a pic of the hatching.

Junglegeorge, Ill also post a pic of the hammock. It is very simple, just a frame with a thick plastic hammock fastned over it, with a 2" hole cut in the bottom for the females eggs to flow out of. Plastic seems to not grab the scales as much as cloth, thats why I used it, although it is not wet and is a bit slippery, it worked fine and did no damage to the female.

Ill follow up on this thread on Friday evening.

[jckoi]

very interest to know. keep us post.

[dizzyfish]

Emerald KOi,
Good luck raising the spawn. I look forward to seeing the pictures.
Mitch

[xiaohuang7]

Emerald, thanks for sharing, keep up the hard work! If I were anywhere close-by, I would help!

[PapaBear]

I love showa (saving up for my first one I want it to be a looker )
Watching the development progress of yours should be a real education for all of us.
It sounds like you have a LOT of work ahead of you with this many pairings coming one right after the other . May your eye be good, your water perfect, and 90% of your fry black

[EmeraldKoi]

Quote: Originally Posted by dizzyfish Emerald KOi, Good luck raising the spawn. I look forward to seeing the pictures. Mitch

You asked about the number of eggs in a spawn. As far as I have read it can be up to 300 000 eggs per kg of fish, so a big fish can produce millions of eggs. My showa was 74cm last year when we measured her, so I guess a million eggs is reasonable.

I did a count and got to about a million eggs, so I hope for half to hatch to fry stage. Naturally I will hope to cull out about 4000 black fry and grow them out till next cull, to end up with about 200 to 400 koi at 7cm or so. Those should by then be of a decent quality and worth leaving for a year or two to grow in the dams.

I counted by taking a high res photo of an area of eggs on one of the brushes, popped it on the computer and with the help of microsoft paint, just tick off a hundred eggs. Then make a block 10 times the size and you have an idea of what sort of area is covered by 1000 eggs. Multiply by the area of the whole brush and you have the eegs on a brush, then times by the number of brushes and add on for the eggs on the plants and the sides of the container in the same way.

By the way, they have started hatching and I have plenty of them all over. I hope they survive till the weekend when I get a chance to cull and put them in the dams. I will feel a lot happier to have a few thousand in the dams rather than so many in a small area where they can easily get damage from the high amonia etc.\\

Paul

[dizzyfish]

Paul,
That sounds like a reasonable way to count them. I remember reading once that someone estimated 50K eggs in spawn. Must have been a smaller koi. I did a bit of research and found someone using a figure of 100K per kilo. I haven't heard 300K per kilo but I never paid much attention before. At any rate it shouldn't be much of a problem getting the 4K black ones. How big of a pond do you have for growing them out once they are down to the 200-400X7cm you plan on growing out? It does sound exciting. Watching Showa develop is a real treat.
Mitch
PS
This is from no less an authority than www.pondkoi.com from the reproduction link. The internet is full of information, some of it better than others.
http://www.pondkoi.com/koi_reproduction.htm

"The female Koi deposits her eggs, approximately 100,000 per kilogram of her body weight, over the pond walls, floor and on any plants. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to collect eggs deposited in this random manner in order to incubate them in an environment where they will not be eaten by their parents or attacked by parasites. If left to their own devices, a few of the eggs will hatch and you can then collect the offspring and raise them in an aquarium."