Precautions for new fish before entering the tank
- When first raising koi, the new water should be left for a while, with the filter and air pump turned on, for about three days to a week before the fish are released.
- When the new fish arrive, pour the raw water from your home into a large organizer, place the bag in it and soak for 30-50 minutes to ensure a consistent water temperature.
- Put potassium permanganate in the raw water, at a consistency that makes the water pink. Pour out some of the water in the bag and add the water from the finishing box to the bag and repeat several times. This process lasts about 10-15 minutes.
- Move the fish into the quarantine tank, which should first be filled with five thousandths of sea salt, and add Japanese yellow powder in the proportions indicated to enhance oxygenation. After three days, the fish can be transferred to your own aquarium or pool if there is no problem.
- Don’t feed the fish for three days after it enters the new environment, and then feed it again when you see it has fully recovered.
Daily Precautions for Keeping koi fish
- New tank or new pool should pay attention to every day to change more water, if the water is kept better, twice a week can be changed.
- If any of the fish do not eat or lie in the corner, you should consider whether the fish is sick or not.
- When transferring fish, it’s best to use a professional koi retrieve net, usually using a fairy net, which is less likely to cause damage to the fish.
- When you see the fish rubbing itself, it is usually parasitic, and you may want to consider worming.
- If you see that the water has been rather cloudy, you should consider whether there is a problem with the filtration system.
- Don’t be too quick to quarantine when the fish is sick. If quarantine is needed, it should be a quarantine tank with a complete filtration system.
- Do not buy a large number of koi from different fisheries at the same time to prevent cross contamination.
- You should have some common medications at home such as coarse salt, Japanese yellow powder, potassium permanganate, antibiotics, and insecticides.
- When buying in fish, consider the size of your water and the efficiency of your filtration system, and don’t keep fish at too high a density.
Specific details of water maintenance and fish stocking and daily medication delivery
Raise water. The key step to raise koi is to raise good water. How to raise good water? Usually you need to keep the water well before you put the fish in, and there are several ways to do this: first, leave the tap water naturally for more than three days. Second, leave the tap water in the sun for two days. Third, you boil the tap water to 40 degrees and leave it for 8 to 24 hours. Another option is to use solar powered water, but since many solar power sources have aging problems, the water often contains some oxidized metals, so it is generally not recommended. Water kept well by these methods is generally used for all water changes and initial fish water, but if the usual general water changes are made, the requirements can be reduced as appropriate!!!
Change the water. You can’t be lazy and take chances if you want to keep koi. It is generally a requirement to change the water every day, about two tenths of the water change every day. Then do a major water change every 20 days, and preferably with a drip flow in and out of the water at any time. The minimum requirement is one third of a water change every week. If the water mixes up badly during this period, reduce the time for a major water change and increase the daily water change. If there is no special need, please use a high degree of transparency of the water culture, so as to facilitate ornamental. Water change is the most troublesome and most daily work in the process of fish farming, is often the most test of patience and enthusiasm!
Put the fish in. After you buy the Koi, don’t put the fish into the tank immediately, but put them into the tank together with the fish bag to get used to the water temperature (don’t open the bag). . The time to adapt to the water temperature is about one hour, if the original water is not very dirty, it is recommended to put the fish into the aquarium with the water, the original water is very poor, it is easy to bring bad water quality. If the original water is not very dirty, it is recommended to put the water into the tank together. Don’t feed the fish within one week after releasing, firstly, to let the fish adapt to the new environment as soon as possible, and secondly, to observe if the fish is sick, if you find any abnormalities, please ask the boss for a replacement immediately (it is difficult to determine the cause of some fish after feeding, and new fish usually don’t eat).
Medication and daily management. When you go to the fish shop to buy fish, the boss generally want to give you some recommended drugs for you to buy together, in fact, as long as you keep good water and then release the fish, you don’t need to put those drugs at all. In the actual process of fish farming, I also do not recommend the use of drugs, because I have a few friends is because of the use of drugs, resulting in the good fish died for no reason. If you think about it, why do you need to take medicine if you are not sick? If the fish is sick, specific medications are used depending on the condition, and there are some general methods such as table salt, oxytetracycline, penicillin powder and xanthohumol, and if the cause of the disease cannot be determined, it is advisable to add a large amount of oxytetracycline (from my experience, this trick works very well!). .
Filtration and stocking levels. Filtration in addition to filtering out impurities, the most important role is to cultivate a biochemical system, so that the fish grow up healthy. If the tank is not too big, I still recommend buying a filter directly from the boss of the fish shop, because the boss will be very professional to give you with a filtration system (do it yourself although a bit to save money, but a lot of small problems is very troublesome! . In this process you just need to ensure that the flow of your filter pump can circulate the water in the aquarium 4 times per hour, and always replace the activated carbon and other substances according to the degree of biochemical damage in the filter. The most important thing is to make sure that you have the right amount of water in your tank to keep the koi. According to my experience and books on the subject, it is best to keep a koi carp of about 20 cm for every 60 to 100 liters of water, and for a tank, the length of the tank should be more than 90 cm. The best water depth for Koi is 60 to 250 cm, and it is said that a depth of 200 cm is the easiest way to keep a big fish. When the fish are close to the width of the tank, you should move them to a bigger tank or pond.