Keeping Koi Healthy: A Brief How-To

Keeping Koi Healthy: A Brief How-To

The easiest way to keep your koi healthy is by keeping the water clean, but other factors come into play. The following list is a glimpse of the most important ways you
can protect your koi:

Koi just don’t do stress well. Moving a koi into a new pond, overcrowding koi, or introducing sudden water temperature changes can all stress koi. Stress drop-kicks the immune system, and then every opportunistic bacteria or parasite takes advantage of the situation. Chapter 12 helps you recognize some of the causes of stress and explains how to head off some of the effects.

Always quarantine new fish. You may have thought quarantines went the way of the dodo and the bubonic plague, but for koi, quarantining new fish is the only way to prevent possibly fatal pondwide problems. Setting up a quarantine pond or tub is easy (and you can use the same tub for raising koi babies if you somehow — despite or because of your efforts — end up with koi eggs).

Adjust your koi’s environment according to weather. Rainy Seasons brings prolonged cold temperatures that are hard on creatures that can’t produce their own heat to stay warm. When water temps fall, koi literally cannot function; they can’t digest food (so you don’t feed them for weeks on end), and they have trouble swimming. Watching koi slowly maneuver in a 55-degree pond would be almost comical if it weren’t so sad.

Pay attention to your fish. Just like you would for a pet dog or cat, be sure to inspect your koi if you notice strange behavior. Koi are particularly subject to skin ulcers when the water temperature is in the mid-60s, which is typical of an early spring warm-up. Koi are subject to external parasites. Your koi’s skin may suddenly be peppered with white dots or dangling, hairlike tendrils. Parasites are a normal part of life for koi, but they’re not
inevitable. You can get rid of the parasites without having to touch a single one.

Courtesy: Koi for Dummies