With the summer heat bringing warmer water to the pond, the koi and the rosy red minnows have been more active than ever. As noted, our rosy reds have reproduced, hatching at least two batches of fries (baby fish). Dr. Wife first spotted the tiniest, rice-like babies swimming about a month ago, and those initial hatchlings are growing quickly into squiggly adolescence. You can see the eyes on the sides of their tiny bodies now, which is humorous—they have these kind of bug-eyes. In addition, we’re seeing more “grains of rice” swimming around.

The koi are also doing well. We’re up to feeding them about three times a day. Our koi food recommends five daily feedings at current water temperatures, but I find that the koi are good with two or three feedings. The pond is quieter in the mornings, so I rarely feed them before lunchtime; after lunch, though, the koi are hungry and ready to eat!

What’s fun is that the baby rosy reds will swim up and nibble on the koi feed right next to the massive koi! They don’t seem stressed out by the koi at all. The larger adults aren’t, either. I’m sure that our koi have nibbled on a rosy red from time to time by mistake, but it amuses me how even the tiniest babies will swim right into the middle of a koi feeding frenzy to get a nibble at some feed.

The pond is bursting with life. Dragonflies and other insects will dip down for a drink, and it’s cool seeing how they’ll use the surface tension of the water to rest on top of it while sipping. One time I accidentally started a lizard into the pond, and he skittered across the surface to the other side! The koi and rosy reds are likely eating any mosquito eggs and larvae that manage to get into the pond, and the always-running filter likely dissuades mosquitoes from laying eggs there in the first place. It’s such a beautiful little ecosystem.

Maintaining this pond and adding fish and snails to it has been such a blessing. The babies are confirmation that we’re doing something right: the original rosy reds were comfortable and safe and fed enough to lay eggs and bring them fruition. The babies swimming about brings us so much joy.

I particularly love how delighted Dr. Wife gets anytime we feed the fish. She has a lifelong fear of fish, but you wouldn’t know it; she’s even tried touching them! Her sister/my sister-in-law is shocked and amused, because Dr. Wife loves these little creatures. When I mentioned that some pond keepers will cull excess fish, she balked at that idea—so do I! We’re not anywhere near that point, but I’m already researching starting an indoor tank for some of our rosy reds, where I’d also like to introduce some non-color-morphed fathead minnows (rosy reds are just a color morph of the fathead minnow) to breed some cool colors (most will turn drab olive, but some will have little rosy speckles).

God Is Good! I hope our thankfulness to Him comes across in today’s fishy videos.

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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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