Koi Carp and Breeding for Profit
by: Tim Warrington
Koi are amazing animals. They have evolved originally from common carp and were originally thought of as throw backs. The koi world has grown massively and is continuing to grow at an unprecedented rate. Years ago if you heard of someone spending £1000 on a fish you may have fell over, in this day and age this is commonplace.
Quick sum for you to get you interested.
Each kilogram of female koi will produce approximately 200000 eggs if you hatch out 100000 eggs and grow the koi to 2-3" which takes approximately 120 days. You will end up with 100000 fish a value of 60p each trade. The cost of arriving at this point is approximately 10p per fish, you now have a profit of 50p per fish = £50000. I hear you ask "why doesn’t everyone do it" Firstly is knowledge, you do need a good degree of knowledge to do this. Secondly is holding capacity you will need a large pool or recirculation system to achieve this. Thirdly, it is a risky business, one thing goes wrong with the system and you loose your entire batch of fish.
So how do you start?
This is a long process and I will post these in 10 parts of ezine.
Part one.
Easy Spawning
When spring is in the air water temperature is at about 15-20 degrees you will notice your fish may go off there food. You may also notice three fish swimming like an arrow around the pool. This is two male fish and the female. The male in front will be looking for a place to spawn. This is the time you put in you brushes. The brushes are like a toilet brush but much softer. These brushes must be placed in the shallow water approx 6-10" deep.
When the fish are ready they will start to thrash over the brushes this normally happens in early morning.
After approximately one hour you will see the brushes are covered with eggs very tiny eggs.
The eggs need to be moved to a separate tank or old bath or the parents will eat them. It is best to treat the eggs with malachite to prevent fungus a quick dip is fine as you don’t want to starve the eggs of oxygen.
The bath or tank must be setup to have running water the flow needs to be 5 liters per minute (very low) you can pump this directly from you pond if you wish. When the water arrives at the tank use an old bed sheet to filter the water. The water needs to be as clean as possible or the tiny little particles will stick in the baby koi gills causing slow growth and death.
The eggs will take approx 3-4days to hatch, then the real fun begins
Next article 18/10/06
About The Author
My name is Tim Warrington i own a company called http://www.aquatico.co.uk , I have been successfully setting up and building koi farms for over 8 years. I built my last fish farm in the desert for food fish, I have bred all sorts of koi/fish and sold them for massive profit, I am here to share this with you in a 10 part series.
