Breeding & culling in Japan

Having been out to Momotaro Koi Farm in Japan to learn about breeding and culling through three Summers, I figured that I would add these pages in the hope that you will find them interesting. Hopefully, these pages will help you to understand the early stages of how Koi as we know them, are produced in Japan. Enjoy... Mike.

After a successful breeding, the parents are removed from the pond, so that the eggs can be left to hatch.

Here, you can just about see the eggs stuck to the spawning ropes.

This is what fry look like at just a few days old..

These newly hatched fry are then counted. Although these pictured are being counted accurately, this is only to get an idea of roughly how many are in one of the small white bowls. Thereafter, they then count by judging the apparent mass of fry in each of the subsequent bowls, which are then totaled up, before being put into the mud pond.

As soon as the Koi are big enough to take pellet food, they are fed on a daily basis with the corresponding size pellet. These start almost like grains of salt in size, and work up in size as the Koi grow.

These young Koi are just about to be pulled up for their first selection.

The shallow mud pond is harvested using a fine drag net.

These fry are then scooped up, and put into a transport tank on the back of a truck.

A closer look at some of these fish being scooped up.

This is the 'Senbetsu' house. The Summer temperatures are circa 35 to 40c, so this selection is done in an air conditioned room, so that the fry don't get too hot whilst in the tank. From left to right in this pic... Myself, Kan-chan, and Nakagawa-san.

As you can see, in this Sanke breeding, there don't appear to be many good Koi. This is quite the norm. The keepers from such a breeding would normally be around 1 in 30. You have to have a very keen eye at this stage, as the 'keepers' will have very heavy Sumi, which tends to hide the Kohaku pattern that you have to look for.

The fry are then thrown into a bowl on the floor, which seems a little heartless admittedly, but they are not allowed to be thrown into the river.

The 'Tategoi' at this stage are then taken back to the mud pond. Here, Daisuke-san is scooping them up and passing them to Nakagawa-san, to release them into the pond.

Here is what comes of the fry that aren't kept. They are boiled and mashed up before being fed back to their siblings. Theory has it, that such a process also helps make the young Koi more disease resistant.