Saturday, December 7, 2013

A letter to Dave in the UK about the colors in Koi.

Dave, there is something that I noticed this year during pond tour. We had, that is our club had, pond tour at the end of July and a few friends and myself went around to look at other people’s ponds.

What we notice is those people that used the anoxic filter are incorporated it with their other filters, their color of their Koi seem to pop. We visited one pond in Naperville that has a $20,000 filtration system and his Koi seem to have that color that just popped at you, too. Most people's ponds we visited their Koi colors were good but they were more mated down colors. Of course I'm not talking about cheap Koi are they were using cheap inexpensive foods to feed their Koi, and most had some pretty expensive filtration systems costing in the $7000 or less category.

Whether it has something to do with the clay, or water quality, it's not really fully understood why this is happening. Some people have a theory that it's the clay and the ponds are acting like a Japanese mud-pond/cay-pond. Some say because of the nitrates being consumed by the bacteria this is adding to the water quality. They justify this by the progress that they make with their fry using the Anoxic filtration system.

As we hobbyist begin to learn more and more about what clay can and cannot do for our fish this really brings up a lot of questions. I think the Japanese have found the answer hundred's of years ago and we westerners are still in the learning process. To an untrained eye the Koi's colors would go unnoticed. But to the trained eye, it is quite obvious that you can see the difference.


Of course there is no scientific proof backing up anything that I say, and some may even argue that there's a lot of variables that aren't being accounted for. There is one thing everyone can agree on through, the evidence is there and for some reason it's doing what the more expensive filters can do. However, the explanation of why it's able to do it is still up for discussion.




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