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    Thread: Matt's showa spawn 2015

    1. #41
      Matt24's Avatar
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      Quote Originally Posted by Roger View Post
      Matt, the frozen daphnia, baby brine shrimp and blood worms are to expensive for me here.
      I bought these in the form of little cubes in trays, 3.5 oz for about 4 bucks (Hikari brand). The brine shrimp were a little less, the daphnia a little more. It is a little cheaper to buy it in the form of flat slabs, but not as convenient.

      Quote Originally Posted by Roger View Post
      that's about an once of store bought ammonia to 30 gallons of water.
      That provides some perspective, thanks Roger. I've also been looking to see if there are any inexpensive tests for chloramine. I'd like to test the tap water to see how much chloramine removing product it takes to clear the chloramine out. There are instructions on the bottle, but different public water systems use different levels of additives.

      Also, usually I don't add tap water to the fry pond. I add it to my larger pond, let the big filter take care of the ammonia, and then pump that pond water into the fry pond.

      Matt
      Last edited by Matt24; 06-10-2015 at 11:58 AM.

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    2. #42
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      All that frozen food is very expensive here and totally out of the question when feeding a spawn of koi. Just wondering why you don't grow your own daphnia, it's simple and requires little work (just what I like). My culture tub has been going now for 12 years and provide endless free live food food for the fry.

    3. #43
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      Quote Originally Posted by Wombat View Post
      Just wondering why you don't grow your own daphnia, it's simple and requires little work (just what I like). My culture tub has been going now for 12 years and provide endless free live food food for the fry.
      I don't know much about growing daphnia, but I'd appreciate any tips or good links on it. The "endless free" part sounds good. Three questions come to mind for starters:

      (1) Does it make a breeding pool for mosquitos? (major concern for us) Or is there something that one can do about that?

      (2) Will the daphnia live over the winter in a climate where the water freezes?

      (3) How much water volume does it require?

      Thanks, Matt

    4. #44
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      G'day Matt, Without Daphnia I don't think I would bother breeding koi I just would not have the time required to spend on managing the fry using hand feeding methods. My culture tub is a 100L plastic tub filled and topped up when necessary with pond water. The tub is kept beside my shed in an open semi shaded position with a open ended air hose producing large bubbles running very gently to just move the water slightly ( I think this may deter mozzies as they don't like moving water and I never see them in the tub). The ideal conditions for Daphnia are still water with high levels of decomposing organic matter and water temp between 65 and 75F and slightly alkaline. Daphnia produce eggs which are either hatched internally or deposited in the sludge as cysts that are able to withstand freezing and drought for long periods. I feed them with crushed lettuce leaves and the occasional hand full of hay. My area's winter is cold enough (not freezing thank God) for the Daphnia to become dormant but they quickly proliferate during spring. At the onset of spring I prepare fry ponds by creating nice green water ready to seed with the first flush of daphnia from the culture tub. At the beginning of summer I start a second 100L tub with green water and seed with daphnia and then leave it alone to continue the culture. The other tub I now harvest heavily until production is minimal at which point I then empty and clean the tub ready for next year. It's a waste of time worrying about mosquitos around here but I guess you could mesh the top of a tub to keep them out if necessary.

    5. #45
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      It may depend on your kind of daphnia. I have native daphnia in my horse water troughs and I introduced them into my water lily tubs too. They freeze solid over the winter (NE Ohio) and return in the spring. Production slows in the heat of the summer, then picks back up for a few weeks in the fall. I get mosquito larvae in the tubs, but I just harvest them for my killies and bettas. Just use a larger mesh net and the daphnia go through and you can catch the mosquito larvae. I use mosquito egg rafts for the babies too, newly hatched mosquitos are smaller than newly hatched baby brine shrimp. Just float the egg rafts in with the babies.

    6. #46
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      Thanks for the daphnia insights Wombat and LadysSolo. It is something I will consider for the future.

      Quote Originally Posted by Wombat View Post
      It's a waste of time worrying about mosquitos around here ....
      I know what you mean, having previously lived next to a swamp in rural southern US. But in this area of Oklahoma, avoidance measures can help with the skeeters.

      On another note, I had mentioned wanting to find inexpensive tests for chloramine. Well, I found some test strip kits (for ~50 tests) around $10-$15 in stores that sell pool supplies. I saw that my tap water has very little if any free chlorine, but about 3 ppm total chlorine. I understand chloramine is total chlorine minus free chlorine. So the chloramine is about 3 ppm here. I am finding that some chloramine removing products target a lower chloramine concentration. So more product is needed than the instructions say. Some products indicate the ppm level that the product treats and some do not. If your chloramine levels are anything like mine, you may need to use more product. But the stuff can be expensive, so to me, it makes sense to get a kit to know about how much product I need to use. Some chloramine removing products seem to fall short of claims and some dechlorinators that don't even claim to remove chloramine actually seem to remove some.

      Bottom line: Koi keepers that use a public water supply may want to run a test on a 100 gallon tub to see how high the chloramine is and how effective their treatment product really is, and it might be good to check occasionally, because some cities may change their treatment levels from year to year or from season to season.

    7. #47
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      Here are photos of an unculled random sampling of the fry 30 days after hatching. Most seem to be 1/2" to 5/8" with a few 3/4" and a few only 3/8". I have not seen any real big ones. So tobi do not seem to be a major issue thus far. And if some are only 3/8" at 30 days, maybe it's just as well if they wind up contributing to someone else's growth.

      Previous samples seemed to be 30% or 40% black, but this sample looks more like 25%. I am starting to see some difference between yellow and white and some between black and gray. A small number seem to have subtle patterns beginning to emerge, but not much yet.
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    8. #48
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      Dream big!

      (I did not put the worm in there. He just found it.)
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    9. #49
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      Matt, My adult koi are afraid or earth worms.

      Quote Originally Posted by Matt24 View Post
      Dream big!

      (I did not put the worm in there. He just found it.)

    10. #50
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      They look good matt

      mine are a little ahead of yours with their age
      I'm just getting a few black with colors trying change
      and a lot of whitish gray ones starting to develop

      i have been netting out solid orange ones every day for the last week

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    11. #51
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      Quote Originally Posted by Roger View Post
      Matt, My adult koi are afraid or earth worms.
      I find the big koi might ignore worms at first, maybe not knowing what they are. But once they get a taste, everything changes. Soon they are racing each other to fight for them!

    12. #52
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      Quote Originally Posted by delbert View Post
      They look good matt

      mine are a little ahead of yours with their age
      I'm just getting a few black with colors trying change
      and a lot of whitish gray ones starting to develop

      i have been netting out solid orange ones every day for the last week

      Thanks Delbert. I look forward to your observations and maybe some photos of them on your thread. I occasionally see some that look like a two-toned pattern of black and gray, and I am wondering if those might develop into shiro utsuri.

      I have a separate 300 gallon filtered tub running, and have moved just a few of the yellow/orange ones to it. These are mostly larger ones that might start eating siblings, though I am not thinking that is really much of a problem at this point.

    13. #53
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      Quote Originally Posted by delbert View Post
      ... i have been netting out solid orange ones every day for the last week
      Well I had to step that up a bit myself today. My wife reported a yellow and white one cruising the shallows picking off the tiniest ones left and right. So I went fishing and pulled out a 1 - 1/4" one that may have been him, plus 20 or so others with no black that were just under an inch and I put them in my separate tub. I suspect I will be doing this a good bit in the coming days.

    14. #54
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      Matt with Showa spawns my first cull is to take out and keep only the black fry which I do as soon as they become free swimming. I use a length of about 5mm tube and manually suck them up one at a time. Normally takes 6 beer's per thousand. Past experience has shown me that the vast majority of the white fry are aka and shiromuji that grow much faster and pray heavily on the black ones that grow at a slower rate. You do get some Kohaku but if Showa is your goal it's not worth keeping the white fry in my opinion. I would at least keep the white separate from the black to grow on as you can see from your photo they are capable of attacking quite large pray.

    15. #55
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      Quote Originally Posted by Wombat View Post
      Matt with Showa spawns my first cull is to take out and keep only the black fry which I do as soon as they become free swimming. I use a length of about 5mm tube and manually suck them up one at a time. Normally takes 6 beer's per thousand. Past experience has shown me that the vast majority of the white fry are aka and shiromuji that grow much faster and pray heavily on the black ones that grow at a slower rate. You do get some Kohaku but if Showa is your goal it's not worth keeping the white fry in my opinion.
      Early culling is probably the way to go. But I have been trying a different approach. It's been 39 days and I have not culled any yet.

      Quote Originally Posted by Wombat View Post
      I would at least keep the white separate from the black to grow on ....
      This I have been doing. Over the last week and a half, I have been using an adult koi net with holes that are about right for catching fry that are 1" and up while letting most others slip through. It also catches lots of the 3/4" fry that I dip out with a small net before they find the holes. By this method, I've moved over 400 yellow, white, or orange ones to the separate filtered tub that has about 300 gallons in it. I'm not sure what that translates into in beers. Four of the largest tobi have been 1.5". One was dark gray, but it was an exception.

      One tobi had some shine with a yellow and white body and yellow head with a black head spot. I'm hoping it will be a kin showa. Some fry are fully scaled, some linear scaled. Not sure yet about any other scale types yet. Some yellow on white and gray on black or yellow on black patterns are faintly starting to form, but most are all yellow/white or all dark gray.

      I've added a good bit of baking soda over the last few days. It had already been an unusually wet spring (to say the least) and topped off with a 5-plus inch dumping from the remnants of tropical storm Bill. Ambient highs are starting to move up into the mid-90's now.

      I've noticing there are very few fry with crooked spines and crooked tails compared to recent years. I wonder if this could be due to the cool spawning (64 F, 18 C) and hatching temperatures (62 F, 17 C), with some days between dropping the water into the upper 50's.

    16. #56
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      I'm finally starting to see small number of the larger fry here and there that are beginning to look like showa. This one was swimming in a sunny spot in the shallows. It is a little over an inch and was grazing, paying no attention to the tiny fry ... for now. I also saw a slightly larger linear scaled showa with quite a bit more black. It was hunting and swallowed a tiny yellow one. Another 1 inch fry was a dull yellow with speckles of black (perhaps black giving way to color?), and it had a black tail and dorsal with lots of black on the head.
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    17. #57
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      Nice one Matt,

      Keep up the good work

    18. #58
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      In the past I have maid a pond pump box out of jap matting that worked well with fry as it draws the water all over the box. So there is on current to draw in fry. Cut out the shape and sew it together with nylon twine using small stiches with a running stich.

    19. #59
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      Quote Originally Posted by Steve Sibly View Post
      Nice one Matt, Keep up the good work
      Thanks Steve. Unfortunately, that one turned out to have a crooked tail, which you can kind of see in the picture, but I am hoping to get more with better body conformation.

      Quote Originally Posted by niceshowa View Post
      In the past I have maid a pond pump box out of jap matting that worked well with fry as it draws the water all over the box. So there is on current to draw in fry. Cut out the shape and sew it together with nylon twine using small stiches with a running stich.
      It sounds like you are describing an apparatus to prevent small fry from getting sucked into the pump. Thanks for the tip. In my quarantine tub, I cut up a small plant pot, just leaving a framework, and used the netting from a small aquarium net to drape over it. Then I stuck that over the intake of the pump.

    20. #60
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      I seem to have gotten far more fry this year than in previous years. I think one main reason is being diligent about going after tobi and separating the fry by size. I've reduced the numbers a whole lot, but there are still several hundred fry. I've kept feeding the same amount despite the reduced number. Hopefully this along with the warmer weather will help with the growth.

      Here is some of the equipment I am using:

      This big net works well for netting tobi while letting smaller fry pass through. It has 1/4" diameter holes and is 24" wide with a 6' handle. Note the repair job on the left done with plastic wire ties. This net is also good for removing tad-poles which eat some of the koi food. If I push it along the bottom (avoiding large congregations of fry) to an edge of the pond and lift it up, allow a few seconds for any small fry to squirm through net, what's left is may be a couple of tobi and a bunch of tad-poles. Another nice thing about nets with handles like this is that the handle widens slightly just before it connects to the net ring. So if you slip the pole inside the pole of a standard swimming pool net, it wedges to the inside of the pole where the net's pole widens. Thus you then have a strong 16' or 18' pole (whatever the pool net extends to).

      Name:  big net.JPG
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      This smaller net works better for catching large numbers of small fry around the sides of the pond. It has 1/8" diameter holes and is 17" on each side of the triangle. If I don't move it too fast, the larger koi are fast enough to swim out of the way.

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      Here is my little pond where the spawning took place and where the small fry are. It is about 1800 gallons with a 150 gallon filter and 3200 gallon per hour pump.

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      Here is the quarantine tub where I am putting the tobi and other larger fry. I generally fill it about 2/3 of the way, which is about 350 gallons. I'm using a 32 gallon plastic trash can for the filter. I set the tub in a hole about 18" deep and piled dirt around the sides so that when it gets cold, the tub won't have such fast temperature swings. I put camouflage duck-blind material around the exposed bright blue edges of the tub, just for looks.

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      I also put one 3" tobi in my main pond due to concern it might even eat some of the larger fry in the quarantine tub.

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