Koi are a species of carp. They have been raised in Japan for centuries for their beauty. Many of them have beautiful coloring and markings. They're very long lived, sometimes up to a couple hundred years. Most of them were only about six inches long when we purchased them and placed them in our pond, but they grew and eight of them reached about two feet. We had had some of them since 1983; No one knows how old they were when we got them—however long it takes to reach about six inches. In July of 1998 a disaster occurred and eight of the largest koi died. The smallest four survived (they weren't small; they were each over a foot long). After that we added four baby koi, each about two inches long. They're now over a foot long. The picture shows the pond the way it was prior to the disaster. We enjoy our koi very much although, unlike many koi owners, we don't have names for ours. There is an excellent web page about koi that you might like to
see: A Beginner's Guide
to Koi and Koi Ponds. A recent Google search for the word "koi" returned
over two million hits. |
