I’ve been dedicating recent Wednesday posts to highlighting some of WordPress’s features, so I haven’t been running many Midweek Koi Pond Updates. However, we have big news from the pond: our rosy red minnows had babies!
Rosy red minnows are a color morph of the common fathead minnow, a popular baitfish that is found in freshwaters all over North America. The rosy red variety first appeared in the 1980s in Arkansas (I believe; at the time of writing, I can’t find where I read that—d’oh!), and the variety has become popular as a decorative fish in aquariums and ponds. It is still used widely as a baitfish, too.
Dr. Wife and I purchased our rosy red minnows from PetSmart back in the winter. The fish feed off of biofilm and other effluvia in the pond (and will also eat little bits of the kois’ food pellets), and help to manage algae while adding only minimally to the bioload of the pond.
They also reproduce very quickly. We started with an initial population of ten, then I added twenty more. I imagine some may have ended up as snacks for the koi, but a number of them have survived and thrived. As soon as the hot South Carolina summer survived, they laid eggs (which we never saw in the murky pond) and Dr. Wife spotted the first babies two Saturdays ago.
At the time, they were the size of a grain of rice. By last Saturday (when I’m writing this post—I’m working ahead!) they were bigger than they even appear in this video. They went from being tiny white little swimmers into being small, pinkish critters.
From what I can gather, we’re likely to get another batch of eggs at some point this summer; given that it appears this batch hatched three or four dozen, we’re looking at potentially having over 100 rosy red minnows in our pond. Again, my research indicates that even at these numbers, we’ll be fine in terms of bioload. Of course, we’re likely to see geometric growth, so at some point I’ll start giving rosy reds away or selling them locally as baitfish and pets. I’ll also eventually get a twenty-gallon tank and start raising some of them indoors, which should make for a nice little side project (one other goal is to catch some wild fathead minnows and let them breed with the rosy red color morphs, which will mostly see a return of the drab, olive-green coloring of the dominant gene, but will also produce some recessive rosy reds and—and this excites me—minnows with olive-green scales with pinkish spots).
Of course, the koi will likely thin the numbers a bit. For the most part, though, the koi have been ignoring the babies. We’ve seen Sunny, our big yellow koi, skim through the area where the minnows like to gather—the surface near where our cascading bog filter allows water to cycle back into the pond—and it appears he is sometimes picking up a rosy red snack—but there are so many of them, it’s probably beneficial for him to snack on a few. That said, one cool trait of rosy reds is that the fathers will guard egg clumps, and will even eat algae off of the surface of the eggs to protect them until they hatch.
What really makes me overjoyed about the babies (called “fries” in the fish world) is that it’s a sign that our pond is healthy. It also means that the rosy reds aren’t stressed out by the much larger koi, and are successfully reproducing. Of course, I also love how delighted Dr. Wife gets when she sees them.
Today’s video is probably already a bit dated, but I’ll continue to send along some more updates soon.
For now… it’s baby time!
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