Find here the essentials and best sellers for our pond owners.
Find here the essentials and best sellers for our pond owners.
How to ensure the growth of your koi? The koi carp is a species close to the common carp intended for the ornamentation of the basins thanks to its shimmering colors. This fish originated in Japan and dates back to the 1700s. It began to be bred in rice farms by Japanese farmers who appreciated its particular patterns.
Today, there are many varieties of koi carp on the market, which delight enthusiasts around the world. For an ornamental pond populated by beautiful koi, you will need to control their diet as well as their habitat.
Koi carp grow mainly in the first five years of their life. In order to optimize this growth and that the fish remain healthy, it is essential to feed them with food adapted to their organism. In shops, food is mainly offered in the form of pellets.
Be careful to choose the right food because koi carp have difficulty storing fat.
Aquifood & Saki Hikari Growth feeds meet these requirements by offering a balanced formula that reduces the fat deposits of growing young carp. Aquifood foods also focus on the quality of their products, while offering pellets that can be used almost all year round.
Carp should be fed according to the temperature of the pool. In normal times, it is recommended to offer them several meals each day in order to optimize their growth. In cold weather, their appetite decreases and they will need to be fed less. Thus, below 15°C, a single meal a day will suffice.
At temperatures lower than 11°C, it will be necessary to offer them food adapted to the cold, easily digestible and every two days at the most. Finally, below 4°C, it will be necessary to stop feeding them. Ichi Food Champion foods, developed to raise competition quality koi carp, have been developed to be used from 9°C.
It is essential to feed your koi carp several times a day because the digestive system of these fish is poorly developed, they do not have a stomach but just a long digestive tract. By feeding them more often but in smaller quantities, you therefore promote their growth by allowing easy absorption of the nutrients from their diet.
In addition, it is important to know how to dose the right amount of food to give them according to the total weight of the carp present in the pond. This will avoid any unnecessary waste but also any risk of pollution of food not consumed immediately. The vast majority of the year, the amount of food to be given will be around 2% of the total weight of the fish present in the pond.
Ensure pond water quality / If pond water quality is not monitored, food control alone will not be enough to grow your koi carp under good conditions. To promote rapid growth, the pond water must be continuously filtered using an efficient pumping unit.
The latter must be able to eliminate all the waste in order to maintain the biological balance of the water, necessary for the development of the fish. It will therefore be necessary to carry out regular tests of the various pollutants, in particular ammonia and nitrite, which are particularly polluting elements in a pool.
It is most of the time an excess of food which is at the origin of this pollution. Ammonia is the main waste product resulting from the decomposition of non-ingested pellets or from the metabolism of fish.
The production of ammonia by fish is therefore logically linked to the quantity of food given. It is for this reason that it is essential, as mentioned above, to properly control the diet of your fish.
Fish overpopulation can also cause nitrogen pollution. It is therefore necessary to keep the density of koi carp as low as possible.
Ideally, it will be necessary to provide 1000 liters of water for each carp introduced into the basin, in order to avoid any risk of pollution. This rule is especially important when carp are young and growing rapidly.
Moreover, if your goal is to grow your carp as much as possible, know that the larger your pool, the more your fish will tend to grow because it will have space to move.
In a large, healthy and controlled pond, your carp will want to move around in search of their food, which promotes their natural instincts and growth.
Koi carp are able to live in a tank with cool temperatures. But the latter tend to slow down their metabolism, which also slows down their growth. In order to help the fish grow all year round, the ideal is to keep the water in the pond between 25°C and 28°C.
Thus, young carp will grow better and much faster in a heated pond. There are additional heaters for ponds that will stimulate the metabolism of your fish as well as their appetite.
It can also be cumbersome to feed your carp several times a day. You will find food dispensers on the market that allow you to regularly distribute small quantities of food in their basin.
These devices relieve you of this tedious task while promoting the growth of your carp, optimizing their colors and avoiding the production of pollution due to uneaten food remains.
The secret is therefore to distribute to them in small quantities, but regularly, foods adapted to their metabolism. In order to ensure the growth of its koi carp, controlling the quality of their habitat is also an essential point in order to prevent any pollution from hindering their growth.
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