Time to thin the herd - or cull the school - We need to sell the baby fish, so in Chris went to start the capture. They are clever little things and they can jump quite high and quite quickly! But he managed to capture them.
Chris uses a two-net method. Chase the little cuties with one net and make they leap into the other one.
These are the babies we are keeping for another year. We enjoy watching them grow and develope their color patterns. We've been trying to add more red to our collection, so we're keeping this red-head and the red and white. We're also looking for a tancho koi - white with a red dot on its head, so we have high hopes for the white one. The fourth one was a surprise. The pretty yellow markings are unusual and we just want to see how it turns out.
We also paired up a couple to see if we can collect more sanke babies. Sanke is a white koi with red and black markings. We moved two very large koi to the secondary pond and hope they like each other enough to mate and produce thousands of little red and black marked babies. We'll see. So far, they seem pretty happy. They are swimming side by side, happily destroying the plantings in the pond.
The red-head is Fuji, a 12 year old female.
The white fish is Ichabod Koi - a male, about 10 years old.
Both are 24 inches long and both were quite insulted to have been captured. Wish them luck!
