Here's a few fish from today on the fly and feeder. I had the white koi on floating bread in the margins. It's only the second time it has been caught in around 4 years, not because it is particularly hard to catch, but because I don't really want to catch them too often and only catch the koi once every few years to check their health.



This fish has a small deformed tail. I got it along with a few others from a pond owner who wanted to get rid of a small pond. Do you think it could be due to it being stunted in a small pond?

Your white koi is called a Shiro Bekko, Shiro being white and Bekko is the black pattern. It's actually got some reasonable attributes from a koi keepers point of view! The other koi has no doubt suffered from a small pond but it could have the deformity from birth, you get a lot with bent tails, they should be culled as soon as you see it.

I take it you're a koi keeper then? What do koi keepers look for in a good fish, and what makes one carp better than another?

I had a few goldfish in an aquarium a bit ago and they had some fry, and some of them had bent backs, is that what it is? They got eaten anyway

Here's another fish that we got from the pond



And this koi has been in there a while now.

Yeah, hence the name!

There's a lot of different things that make a nice fish but very basically your looking at skin quality, body shape, fin quality, depth & strength of colour & markings. Koi are a mutant so out of millions of fry you get very few that make the grade, that's why the real stunners fetch £100,000's, though they very rarely leave Japan.

Bit of reading if your interested:

http://pond-life.me.uk/koi/koivarieties.php

You get a lot of deformities in fry and they will be eaten by others but cannibalism isn't desirable as you end up with fish that are called 'Tobie's' and once they've got the taste for fish they wont eat anything else!

Thanks, just clocked on that your usernames "koi" lol

A good read:

http://www.nkc.org.uk/html/koi_appreciation.html