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How to Breed Koi

Fish Tanks, Koi

If you want to breed koi it will take a lot of work and a little bit of money as well. You will need a good size aquarium for the koi because you cannot take a baby koi and expect it to mate. You will want to purchase or have a koi which is at least one year old in order to mate. You will want to have at least 2 male koi and 2 female koi. You will want to keep them in two separate fish tanks until the whole process is complete. Make sure that you are buying the correct sex. Do not just purchase 4 koi and expect half of them to be males and half of them to be females. You will want to keep searching until you find koi which are half and half. One koi is possible of producing thousands of eggs so you don’t need more than a few koi. You will need to start this process in February.

You will want to keep the koi separate until the process is complete. You will need two fish tanks at this point. You will need fish tanks which are at least 20 gallons. You will need to purchase two chillers, one for each fish tank. Chillers can be expensive, running around at least $100 per chiller for the fish tank. You will need a chiller to cool down and warm up the water.

First you will need to hook everything up and let the tanks sit for at least 30 days. If you place the fish in the tanks before 30 days you will have problems keeping them alive because the nitrate, nitrite and ammonia levels will sky rocket. Once the tanks are set up for 30 days you can then place the fish in the tanks. You will need to provide them with decorations such as plants. You will need to make sure that the chiller is working. Start out with a temperature around 75 degrees. You will want to slowly drop the temperature down around 1 or 2 degrees per day in both fish tanks.

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Once the temperature is around 45 degrees you will want to leave the temperature there, in both tanks, for around 60 days. Only feed the fish every other day and feed the fish a variety of fish food such as flakes and frozen brine shrimp. This will ensure that the eggs are healthy. Once the tank has sat for at least 60 days you can raise the temperature slowly back up to around 55 degrees. Leave the temperature there for several weeks and then bring the temperature up to 65 degrees. You will want to do this whole process with both fish tanks. When the temperature is around 65 degrees, place the fish together. Within a couple of days you will have thousands of eggs in your aquarium. Remove the eggs and watch them turn into fry!