December 2001 Selected Articles
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December 2001 Selected Articles |
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Our big event the Koi show is over and we should all be very proud of our achievements. We received numerous compliments from the judges, members of the surrounding clubs and other visitors. All their comments were how much the enjoyed the show and that this show was the best yet. Many mentioned the great quality of our Koi and how helpful and knowledgeable our club members are.
I would like to thank all the volunteers on this show. With out your help this show could not have been such a success. Thank you to all the surrounding clubs for attending and for the four beautiful friendship awards donated by your clubs. For the first time members from other clubs showed their Koi at our show and I’m sure it won’t be the last time.
Many members called me on the awards banquet telling me how much the liked the awards, the food and what a great time they had at the dinner. I remember the laughter coming from the table in the back. The folks from Natures Coast Koi club must know how to have fun.
Club members there is only one thing left to do for this year, the election of new officers for the club. This will take place on December 15 at 5:00 PM at the Hagen’s. Linda and Dave graciously invited the club once again to have the Christmas party at their Mandarin home. We will pick the Koi person of the year, someone who has done a lot for our club in the past year. Like in past couple of years we will have the gift exchange. The club will be providing the main dish for our dinner and all members should bring a side dish or desert.
Please try to attend this important meeting and celebrate the holiday with club members. To all of you who can’t make this date I wish you a Merry Christmas and a prosperous and New Year and hope to see you soon. To all many good friends in the club thank you for your support and friendship over the past years. Fred
SECRETARY'S JOURNAL by Linda Hagan
We had another splendid day for the November club meeting. Chris & Mary Robinson showed us a warm welcome with their lovely yard, pond and home. There were 41 in attendance.
Fred opened the meeting by announcing the Nominating Committee’s selection of candidates for next years Board of Directors. Voting will be held at the Sat., Dec. 15th meeting / Christmas Party. The candidates are: President-Tim Gasson, Vice President-Jim Roberts, Treasurer- Sherri Brown, Secretary-Linda Hagan or Todo Todorsky . (Ed. The candidates have changed since he meeting, see updated list in this issue) You must be present to vote. At the Christmas Party, we will also be doing a gift exchange. If you would like to participate, bring a wrapped $10-$20 valued gift. Also, the club will again be supplying the meat and asking the club members to bring a covered dish.
Next, the club made final arrangements for the fish show. It was decided that on the Friday evening, before the show, the club would take the Judges to dinner at the Golden China Restaurant. Club members were invited to come.
In conclusion, Cindy closed the meeting with an interesting presentation on how to make an inexpensive filtering system using plastic flowerpots.
On November 15th, the 15th Annual Koi Show was held. It was an outstanding show, with almost 150 fish entered for competition. Congratulations to all the winners. Thanks to all the volunteers that helped put the show together.
What are you feeding your fish?
Ed. This comes to us from the San Diego Koi Club via Anne Miller. San Diego has similar winters to ours and their advice is more on the mark than recommendations we get from other parts of the country.
Do you recall your basic biology? How a fish gut is really simply one straight
through shot from mouth to tail? How food coming in is moved through that intestine by the
muscles used by the fish as it swims? Or pushed through by the food it eats.
Then you can better understand why we cut back on feeding koi when winter comes. During
the summer we may treat our babies with cut up citrus, quartered seedless watermelons,
cooked white rice and plain (no sauce) spaghetti noodles, Cheerios, krill and rich color
enhancing foods.
Winter means the water is cooler, the fish, being cold blooded creatures despite the
gaping mouths, need less food because they are simply swimming slower. Here in San Diego
we are fortunate to not really see the ice over the ponds that many other climates have.
We don't have to consider bringing the koi in the basement for the winter, and draining
the pond so the freeze will not crack it. Instead we have the difficult task of watching
the pond temperature and remembering that when it drops to 55 degrees we must not feed the
fish. No matter how much they beg.
California Koi Farm stocks a good winter food, higher in wheat germ and meal, easier on
the digestive tract than the richer meals of summer. Be sure to pay attention to the
labels on the foods you are serving your koi. There is no need to feel them high protein
color enhancing foods while the water is so cool. The food is less likely to benefit the
fish than an equal dose in the spring.
If you plan on showing your fish in February at the show, continue with the winter
formulas and winter feedings, adding in color enhancers if you feel they are necessary in
January - 6 weeks before the show. And of course, ALWAYS withhold food for a week before
showing your fish. With such a heavy fish load, fish who are not going to load the show
tanks with droppings are always more welcome and less unsightly. A common pool thermometer
is quite sufficient to keep tabs on the temperature. Probably the best time to check the
temperature is first thing in the morning when the pond is the coolest. How low the
temperature drops will be a function of where you are located, the movement of wind and,
of course, just how cold the winter decides to be this year. We've been lucky enough for
the last few years to have warm winters, some ponds never dropping below 55 at all.
Save your pond treats for the spring. For now, think basics. A good winterizing food, fed
sparingly, and the fish will come through the winter in better health for the spring.
Something has occurred at our annual Fall Koi show that I feel compelled to get off my chest, openly and in this forum. I had previously decided only to pen this letter to myself (to express my dismay, but send it nowhere), as I did not want to cause dissention in our club. It would appear now that other events have taken place and now there is talk of splitting the club. It really tears at me to do this, but I feel the facts must be told.
Ethics: After the judging was completed and all the awards had been decided, during casual conversation I was complemented for having some truly nice Koi entered in the show and it was too bad that they weren’t considered for any of the top awards. I was dumbfounded and asked for clarification, as I really didn’t understand what the person was talking about. The clarification was quite simple and direct. The judges were instructed that certain tanks in the show (my tanks, 17 and 18 among them) were considered dealer’s tanks and therefore could not be judged for any top awards. I was more than a little in shock. I was not aware that the show had a rule governing this. When I got home Saturday night I checked the show rules for any mention of exclusions of vendors or any other entrants from top awards. Sure enough, no mention anywhere in the show rules on this topic. Did something suddenly change that I am not aware of?
I waited for several days to give the committee a chance to inform me of what had transpired. To this day I still have not been approached by anyone on the Show Committee to tell me that my Koi or the Koi of others were excluded in any way from any awards at the show. Since I did receive some ribbons and plaques at the show, all would appear normal on the surface to those of you that were not aware. I finally got tired of the waiting, so I questioned someone on the committee and all that I have stated above was confirmed. The fact that I was never informed, I find to be extremely poor ethics. I believe at the very least I should have been notified of my disqualification before I brought my Koi to the show or at least before the show started and given a chance to plead my case to the show committee before the judging started. If I had known this in advance, I would not have brought any Koi from my pond to sell. To me this was more like a yard sale venture to sell off an overstocked pond, not a step into the world of Koi dealer. As early as Friday afternoon, Show committee personnel and the show chairman were well aware that I would be selling some babies and a fellow hobbyist’s Koi at the show. Not one of them told me this was a violation of show rules or would result in any form of disqualification.
Before I go further, I will admit that I have been vocal on the point of dealers showing Koi at our show. I believe the following people should not be allowed to compete in our Koi shows for the same awards as the rest of the entrants:
One who purchases Koi wholesale for resale; one who imports Koi for resale; or one who runs a Koi farm (commercial breeder) and sells Koi for a substantial part of his/her income. This would give them an unfair advantage. Unfortunately, this situation has been allowed to exist in all of the past NFKC Koi shows I have been associated with.
Etiquette: Again, my point in all this is that my Koi were excluded from top award competition because I was deemed a Koi Dealer. I was never informed that I was considered a Koi Dealer/Vendor or that my Koi would be excluded from competition. How often has this sort of thing happened in the past? I find this to be deplorable Koi Show etiquette.
This is a once a year event and we all look forward to it. For two years in a row now, I have been invited to a very prestigious, by invitation only, event in Virginia that conflicts with our annual Koi show. Each year I have declined this offer in order to support my club by both showing my Koi and selling goods as a dry goods vendor.
Some of the Koi I entered in this show I am very proud of, but more importantly they had just returned from the Charlotte Koi Show the previous weekend. Two of my Koi took trophies, one for best in size five and the other was the Young Grand Champion, out of 192 Koi entered in the show. This same Young Grand Champion took a first place in Chantilly, a show of well over 200 Koi entered. This was my first chance to pit some nice Koi up against some of the other club member’s top Koi. This was also a calculated risk (to the health of the Koi) I took by showing these Koi two weekends in a row. I would never, never have done this if I had known they would be excluded. I, nor anyone else, will ever know what may or may not have been because my Koi were never judged against their peers. It is an event that happens once a year and once the moment has past, it is lost forever. This Koi show should have exhibited etiquette, fair play, sportsmanship, comradeship and most of all encouragement, but it didn’t.
Disclosure: I have been repeatedly encouraged by several of you to PLEASE bring some of my baby Koi to the shows to sell. I did this willingly since I was asked to. The monies I received helped pay for my trip to the AKCA seminar in Houston this year. At the same time, I entered Koi in the show and won Baby Grand Champion (Didn’t have any problem with disqualification there). See Forum pg 9
Forum: I thought this was great that my club wanted me to sell these Koi and I got some cash to help me go to Houston. How many of you have sold Koi? I know of more than one!! As for my Koi sales, let me assure all of you that I have never bought any Koi wholesale for myself or for resale. The large Koi that I sold at the show were those of a fellow hobbyist I was trying to help, who needed to decrease his pond population. I derived NO money from the sale of any of this persons Koi, ZERO, NOT A CENT. My personal Koi that I sold, I did so only to help offset the cost of raising them and nothing more. For those that were watching me sell my personal Koi, you probably noticed that I gave away as many Koi as I sold. If a young child had come up to me wanting to buy a Koi, he/she would have walked away with his money and some free Koi, as that is how I feel about the hobby. I have taken small Koi to shows like Charlotte and AFKAPS, and entered them in the show only to turn around and give them away to appreciative hobbyists and young novices just to peak their interest in the hobby. Does this sound like a Koi dealer to you?
Closure: Again let me say that I am not saying this to cause further disturbance in the club, that has already happened. This club is bigger than any
one person and we should strive now to strengthen, learning from our faults and create a better club from the turmoil that has brought us to this point. We should not be seeking change through dissolution or dividing this club up. Dissolution/Division is not the answer, resolution to make things better is!!! We have some decisions to make shortly and I hope that they will all be for the betterment of our club. These decisions should not be taken lightly and I encourage all members to attend the next meeting to ensure your feelings and desires are counted for when it comes to deciding how this club is going to function in the future. Rod Lawton (Hobbyist first, dry goods dealer second, still not a Koi dealer)Ed. This piece came to me as an email. Though vandalism has not been a major problem among club member, it is one of the hazards our fish face. I’m presenting this account as it came to me.
Most of you received the S.O.S. this morning regarding Laura's dilemma -- some kid put dish detergent in her koi pond in the middle of the night, and when she went out to check her koi this morning, they were under a 3-4 foot "cloud" of soap bubbles.
I just got home a little while ago, and we think we have things under control... but we were two "inexperienced" koi people dealing with this bit of vandalism. If we ever catch those kids, we have some very creative things we would like to do to them... we figure lobotomies won't work, as they must already have had them in order to act the way they did. Well, here's what happened...
Apparently, one or more kids climbed the back fence at Laura's house and put liquid dish detergent as a prank into the large koi pond. (Laura has a 19-year-old daughter they were probably trying to "impress.") Thank goodness they didn't soap the other two ponds or we would have really had a horrific problem -- it was bad enough as it was.
Laura called looking for suggestions of someone to tell her what to do about the soap in her pond -- I suggested several people and she was able to get Mike Fuller on the phone. Mike and several of our members are headed to the mud ponds in Virginia again (so they will miss our November meeting). Mike was getting on the plane when he answered her call. He suggested that she do a 75% water change, followed by another 75% water change and then a 50% water change. Meanwhile, I grabbed a couple of nets and whatever I could think of to help Laura and headed to her house after sending out the SOS to club members.
We starting pumping out water while trying to catch the fish -- they are FAST! We set up two large containers with water from one of the clean ponds (she has two connected ponds that are separate from the koi pond that was soaped). We caught the fish (it is written simply, but it wasn't an easy job) and then rinsed them by dipping them in the first tub, then in the second before placing them in the other pond. We left them in each tub long enough to let them "breathe" and exchange soapy water for unsoaped pond water. Laura didn't have a quarantine tank, so we had no alternative but this. We dipped the fish so not to take too much soap residue into the other ponds.
Catching the koi was a chore! I remembered that Kenneth Wong catches koi with ease in the large nets and tried to remember how he did it -- and then it came to me. He didn't chase them around the pond, he just let them swim into the net. Once I got that down, we did pretty well. Laura kind of herded them toward me and I let them swim into the net -- actually, it wasn't as easy as that, but that sounds good. I would run across the deck to the tubs at the other side of the yard and put the fish in the net into the first tub, et cetera.
We were down to the last five fast fish... and in the gate walked Brian DeFoe (a past president of KWGCNT, many moons ago). He was getting ready to pick up one of his paintings for the 9-11 memorial event in NYC (where he will be taking it), and he checked his email before leaving for the gallery. Thank goodness! :-)
Jumping into pond clothes instead of his business suit, he headed to Irving to surprise us. Were we delighted or what?! When we couldn't net the last small, quick koi, Brian shed shoes and socks and into the pond he went with a small manageable net. Victory! We even got the gambusia out. :-)
We ran the hose into the pond to create bubbles, which we could scoop out with nets. Have you ever tried to scoop soap bubbles with a koi net? Not fun. We also were emptying the pond at the same time, trying to get 75% of the water out. When we achieved that, we realized that the ratty kid must have emptied the whole bottle of liquid soap into the pond. We would never be able to do enough water changes to get the soap out... so we emptied most of the water while replacing it. Finally, we didn't have bubbles anymore. Hallelujah!
I suggested that we put some of the other pond water into the koi pond to replace the biological matter that we had to empty -- and since all the fish were in the other pond, it would then be "familiar" water to them when they went back into their de-soaped koi pond. Brian helped Laura rig the pump and evacuation hose so that we could pump some of the water from the other two-pond set-up into the koi pond. This worked well, and we added tap water, too. Dechlorinator, etc., was added to the water. We checked the ammonia and other things in the "old ponds" where all the fish were now residing. Laura added an air stone also. In effect, we were doing a "water change" in the other ponds and seeding the cleaned (literally) out koi pond with the old pond water, where all the fish were moved.
Laura backwashed the filter to remove soap residue from it, and we flushed soapy water everywhere -- except back into the ponds! She thoughtfully put a bucket under the pipe that fed water back into the pond to check for suds -- yes, more suds came out. Drat! We cut off the electricity and re-routed the flow outside the pond. What an experience! If we ever catch that kid...
Brian decided it was a good time to do fall maintenance, and he hopped back into the pond and cleaned debris from the bottom -- if I knew I could get help this way, I might just add a little soap... just kidding!
Laura ordered pizza and we ate while things settled down. We had scooped a mountain of soap suds from the surface of the pond, next to the koi pond looked like it had snowed, and we were tired.
The fish seem to be doing okay in their new surroundings. They were soaped sometime in the middle of the night and not rescued until mid-morning from the soap water. They are now in the other pond. The koi pond has been refilled almost completely with a combination of old pond water to "seed" it from the other pond and tap water that has been treated. Laura is not going to add the fish for a while. She will probably put in two fish to see how they do when the pond water has settled down a bit more... a week or three?
In the meantime, if anyone else has had this happen or knows the answer to this question, please respond to me: Is there anything that can safely be added to the pond at this point to remove or break down any remaining soap residue? We hosed down the walls and hopefully evacuated most of the detergent. Some parts of the pond were "soapier" than others, which made us think that the soap may have sunk to the bottom in some areas. (That is why we opted to clean the whole thing out.) Probably the fish will be okay. The water will be left to age. We put some anacharis and other similar plants into the water also to help filter it. We figured if the plants died, the fish would, too -- sort of like the canary in the mine, you know.
So, there you have it. Two inexperienced novice koi people learning more things day by day!
I've had snakes, herons, possums, and other things in my yard, messing with my pond. The soap suds monster in Laura's pond was right "up there" though. She was having a few regrets at not having the dog around anymore to bark and warn of vandals in the night -- they came over her 6-foot fence! I think one of those motion-sensor "scarecrow" things might be a good idea -- hook a bell to it that will ring when it begins to move and set it up right where those kids came over the gate and soak 'em good... now, if we could get it to shoot blue dye...
Let us hear from you if you know what might combat soap in a pond... Judy Fender Koi & Water Garden Club of North Texas Editor, Clear Water Times www.nortexkoi.org <http://www.nortexkoi.org>
Ed. Later I got this email listing some of the response to the soap problem. Just thought I would share with you some of the info that has come in since Laura's "Koi Soap Opera" -- so aptly named by one of our KWGCNT members, Toni Anderson.
Mike Fuller (reached by cell phone at the airport!) put us on the right path with the water changes... he was the first koi expert we could locate to actually talk to!
When we visited the Seminary pond in Fort Worth, the caretaker said that some students did that on a larger scale (its a large public pond). We don't think the fish (can't remember if they were koi or goldfish) were transferred out; just the soapsuds removed. The fish were fine. They were not expensive fish. We can't imagine how the fish could be caught for transferring. Maybe a seine with ten people would do it. We hope that Laura's fish survived unharmed, Sandi and Ben Soedjono
I had passed the message to all the Austin Koi Club members about the soapy
pond. I got back two suggestions which I'm passing on to you.
Claudia Herdeman
For next time -- X10.com sells an inexpensive CCTV camera that can shoot video in
almost total darkness. With the addition of an infrared floodlight -- approx.
$15 for a kit -- almost any videocamera can take full-darkness video. A
standard VCR can capture up to 8 hours on a single tape; security videorecorders are
available used on ebay that can tape a week's worth.
You could have a very sophisticated surveillance system for about the price of a
decent koi. And -- add an X10 cam on the bottom of the pond, and you've got
your koi-cam as well!
Jim PS Guess who owns the texaskoicam.com domain?
here's another-- via Claudia Herdeman (Austin Koi Club), Claudia, I read the soap story you sent and maybe they should contact some environmentally clean up agency, I'm sure they cleaned up soap spills on a much bigger scale. I just don't know which agency. Matt
Hi Judy. This is Mary at Dickson Brothers. Laura will want to add some Pond Protection to her pond where she is temporarily housing ALL of her fish, to soothe, re-slime coat them, and begin healing tissues irritated by that soap. You guys were great to help so fast! The only other time some kids tried to "give the fish a bath" the results were disastrous, with NO fish surviving. Laura will also need to keep a close watch on her ammonia & nitrite levels in the pond that has now had its biological load dramatically increased. She may need some Pond Primer to bind the ammonia & nitrite and buy her time to boost the biological maturity in filter. Let me know if there is further trouble, Kindest regards, Mary @ Dickson Brothers
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