Catching Up - The Spawning & The Giveaway

In my post, You Capture - Water, last week I mentioned that the koi had spawned and I talked about how I had harvested the eggs because if you don't the koi will quickly eat them.

This year I was in a bit of a tight spot because at 6:30 AM, I had to take Mr. Right to work because his car was in the expensive car hospital so I pulled the egg laden plants before I left, even though I knew there was a chance that fertilization hadn't taken place. This first batch I put in the large aquarium in the house and not a single koi fry has emerged - not one.

The rest, as I mentioned in last week's post, were put in the small access pond and a few of them weren't put there until I got back. Then over this busy holiday weekend, as I peered into the water searching for a sign of life, I spotted quite a few tiny little threads moving around. Wow! How awesome would it be if they would just thrive outside without too much interference from me.

Unfortunately, I'm not very optimistic. There are so many things that threaten them mostly because they are so tiny and fragile.

Most worrisome right now are the strange little black bugs in there that might or might not be eating them. I tried to catch one of those potential predators but couldn't and instead I scooped up a fragile little koi baby which promptly died.

Then there's the challenge of feeding them. Should I? I just don't know. Most sites suggest egg yolk or the dust from the bottom of the fish food box but last time we had a spawning I think I killed a lot of them by overfeeding them. Even though I tried hard not to, I think I gave them more than they could eat (which believe me isn't much) and it fouled the water.

Speaking of fouling the water, I can't really run the pumps that provide filtering and aeration because these tiny little bodies would easily be sucked into it and ground to ... you know...nothing.

So I'll give them maybe two pieces of fish food, crumbled into dust, every day; and hope that they can live mostly on the algae that's forming in there. I'll turn off the pumps, or maybe put some fine mesh nylon over it so no innocent babes can be sucked in. Then I'll try to leave them alone. Maybe I'll cross my fingers, too. That should work as well as anything else I've done in the past.

Now for the Walgreens Gift Basket Giveway. I realized early on that Friday night of a busy holiday weekend was probably the worst time to end the comment entries, but I said it so I stuck to it.

There were a total of nine comments and last night I wrote the numbers one through nine on equal sized pieces of paper. I folded them as exactly alike as I could and put them in a bowl. Mr. Right drew out number 7. In checking I see that the 7th comment was made by Sarah so, Sarah, if you'll send me your address, I'll forward it to Walgreens and your gift basket should be on the way. Congratulations!