The Mysterious Musketeers

When everybody came home for my dad's funeral, one of our eagle-eyed Army guys spotted something strange in the big pond where all our biggo koi live. He kept insisting that he saw three, dark fish darting here and there that we didn't even know existed. Finally, everybody else saw them too. Two of them were about 3 inches long and one was about 5 inches long and they just didn't belong there. We had our first koi spawning at the end of June and these guys were WAYYYYY too big to be from that. Besides they were all dark colored and we didn't have more than one koi baby that was solid black among the thousands that hatched. So the odds were remote that there were three koi offspring in the big pond. But the question was what were they and how did they get there.

On June 14th, we took all 13 big koi out of the big pond and put them temporarily in the pond that housed just 3 fairly adult goldfish. After the big pond was cleaned and refilled we netted each one of the koi and put them back into the big pond. All I can figure out is that there must have been 3 goldfish youngsters in there that we didn't know about and that traveled to the big pond in the net with some of the big koi. After all, we always make that transport as quickly as possible and our focus was to not get any of the 3 white and/or red goldfish in the net. Black ones could have slipped in without our ever knowing it AND goldfish always start out dark colored and change when they get older. Koi always start out with colors.

So, they must have been goldfish and we had to catch them to make sure they didn't have those characteristic koi barbels (whiskers) before we let them loose in the wild. So here's the biggest mysterioso:

And the 3 inchers look just like him only smaller.

Unfortunately these three were all very cunning and wily and perfectly matched the pond liner which made them exceedingly difficult to catch. So we ended up completely draining the big pond, moving the big fish into the baby koi pond (formerly the goldfish pond) where they probably snacked happily on their 16 tiny offspring that we'd just put in there this week. But we caught those little buggers and although we didn't plan on cleaning the big pond, we essentially did and now it looks even better than it did.

So I took this picture of the big guys back home in the big pond. It's not a good picture of the fish because of the waves from the waterfall and the aerator but it's a picture that shows the clean, fresh water and the colors of the koi that reside there and are welcome there without those evil little interlopers (who weren't even invited to the big koi party).

And once again, at least for awhile, the fish world is turning in greased grooves.