How To Grow & Select The World's Most Expensive Fish! (Japanese Koi)

Good morning. It's a chilly October day and it's time for us to bring our shower fry indoors for the winter. And the last time you saw these exact fish, they were just five days old. Since then, they've spent the last three months outside in one of our mud ponds. And I think it's safe to say they've grown a lot since you last saw them. But before we get too ahead of ourselves, let's go back a couple of months to see the journey these little fish have been on. So sit back, grab yourself a cup of tea and enjoy the ride. My name is Sam and my job in this video is to show you how we raise and select through the hundreds of thousands of koi we produce each year. In this episode, we'll be continuing on from where we left off in the last video. If you haven't already seen it, it shows you how we breed our koi. I'll leave a link down in the description. But just to bring you all back up to speed, here's a very quick recap. OK, you ready? Right, back to it. Now that you're all back up to speed, let's continue this fascinating journey. Our tiny fry now have a working swim bladder and have depleted their yolk sac. At this stage, they're ready to move out into one of our mud ponds. But before they begin their journey outside, we already have our first selection process. This selection process is called Kuroku. Kuroku is very simple and involves separating out the black-coloured fry from the white-coloured fry. To separate the fry out, we have a special machine that carefully sucks up the fry, collecting them all together in a separate tank. In this case, we are sucking up the black fry and using a clicker at the same time to count the number of fry we have. We want to stock out a maximum of 50,000 fry per pond, so we count them to ensure we don't overstock. Remember that with this spawning, the fish we are trying to predominantly produce are a variety called Showa. And despite only being a few days old, we can already see the colour pigment starting to form on the koi. Not only different in colour, we tend to find that the white fry grow faster and out-compete the black fry for food. As a result, it's in our best interest to separate them out before they go into the mud pond. The white-coloured fry are going to turn into either a Shiromuji, which is a plain white koi, a Kahaku, which is a white and red koi, a Benigoi, which is an all-red koi, or a Tancho Kahaku, which is a white koi with a red head. Whereas the black fry will turn into either a Shiranzuri, which is white and black, a Hianzuri, which is red and black, or lastly, a Showa, which is white, red and black. You can get all of these koi from just one spawning. Once we have finished grading through all the fry, the black fry are put into one pond and the white fry another. Here you can see a bucket of predominantly black fry. However, there are always a few white fry which accidentally get sucked up. But the vast majority are now separated out and moved out into the mud pond by Mark. Our tiny fry are now entering a whole new world. And if we've got our timings right, a world full of lots of food. As we explained in our last video, the water we use on the farm comes from the cuttle brook. Unlike tap water, this river water has a high nutrient load and is full of microscopic life. After the ponds have been filled up, they'll go through a cycle. This cycle begins with an algae bloom, where the water will go bright green from the billions of phytoplankton. I've taken a sample of water out of the pond so we can take a closer look at this underwater life. Phytoplankton are small microscopic plants. And this may seem insignificant, but plankton is one of the most vital organisms on earth. At the bottom of the food chain, without plankton, there would be no koi. Not just that, no marine life in our oceans, no fuel in our cars, no power in our homes and most likely, no us. After a few days, the algae bloom will die down and we'll get our second bloom. This time of rotifers, a type of zooplankton. Zooplankton are small, microscopic animals, barely seen by the naked eye. The reason the algae bloom has died down is because the zooplankton have eaten all the phytoplankton. These rotifers may be small, but they're the perfect size food for baby koi. To put this simply, the phytoplankton feeds the zooplankton and then the zooplankton feed the koi. This is where things can go wrong very quickly. If we put the fry out too early, there'll be too much algae and not enough rotifers. This can kill the fry by super saturation, oxygen crashes or lack of food. This is a very tense time and we only have a couple of days to get things right. But thankfully, with these ponds, we got it spot on and the fish were very quickly seen with fat bellies full of food. Fast forward two weeks and we now have our third bloom in the pond, this time of daphnia. Daphnia are a larger type of zooplankton than rotifers, over double the size. This makes them too large for the fry to eat initially, but once the fry are a few weeks old, the daphnia are the perfect next step for them. The daphnia are big enough for us to spot by eye in the ponds. Here you can see a large bloom of daphnia with some hungry koi predating on them. Hi guys, I just want to take a moment to ask for your help. A huge amount of time, money and effort goes into making these videos and I want to ask a small favour. Can you hit the like button on this video, hit the subscribe button and drop us a comment if you like it. Because doing things like that will really help the future of these videos so we can keep making more for you. Thank you. The day we have all been waiting for, the first pond harvest. This will be the first time we have seen our Showa fry up close since they were just five days old. To catch the fry, we are using a large seine net. The top of the net is lined with floats and the bottom is lined with heavy lead. This means that the fish can't get under or over the net. Once the majority of the net is pulled in, we are left with just a small bag. And if all goes well, this will be full of fish. From the looks of it, it's been a success. So already we can see some nice little Showa, they stand out really well. You can see the black pigment on top of a red pattern. It's a really good little Showa. A very promising little fish at this stage. So already, even at this tiny stage, these fish are just over an inch. We can still see all the patterns forming. So for all we know, some of these fish, in a couple of years time, could be Showa winning fish. This is all the foundation starting now. It certainly doesn't take long to find a good one. This is one of the best harvests we have had for a long, long time. I love it. It's why I do it. I can see the future. So it's going to make my day or break my heart. But these are looking so good, it's going to be a real pleasure to get through these ones. The fry are now carefully netted into buckets, where they are moved into our transport tank. This is a small tank that is solely used for the transporting of fish to and from the mud ponds. It's taking a lot of buckets to empty the net, a good sign of a successful harvest. The transport tank is supplied with pure oxygen. This means that we can stock a very high number of fish and not have to worry about the oxygen levels getting too low. The fry are carefully unloaded, again by bucket, into one of the designated selection tanks, where we'll get a chance to take a closer look at them. It's now time for Mark to go through and look at every single fish we have just harvested. Yes, you heard that correctly. Each and every one. Anyway, that's enough of me. Let's find out what Mark thinks of these koi. So four weeks ago we put the baby fish into the mud ponds. They were the size of an eyelash. This is the first time we've looked at them. And to see the quality of the colours, the quality of the skin, it's fantastic really. It's what I do this job for, it's why I do this, is to find fish like this. These are probably the best Showa that we've ever bred on the farm. The quality of them and the number of quality, just outstanding really. At the end of it, he kept just 2,000 fish, and these lucky koi will go back into the mud ponds for a further few months. And the koi he decided not to keep were made available for sale on our website. Back out in the mud ponds and the remaining fry have now depleted their live food supply, and it's time for Mark to start feeding a dry diet, in this case our 0.5ml fry food. Here we are, it's early October and the fry are now 100 days old. Since their first selection process, our tiny koi have had a further two months outside in the mud pond. But now the temperatures are starting to drop, it's time to bring them indoors into the Tosa house. Fingers crossed they have grown and developed well since we last saw them. When it comes to second selection, Mark has a particular routine to help get them in the right frame of mind. Wow, now that Mark has finished his routine, he can begin some selection. From learning how to breed and select koi in Japan in 1986, Mark has spent many years perfecting the art of selection. This is not something you can learn overnight. He has worked and learnt tirelessly for years to perfect the well-trained eye he has now. It's safe to say he isn't going to give away all his hard-earned secrets. However, as you can imagine, many people have tried to prise these hard-earned secrets away from him. Mark has now finished selecting through all of that pond, and we're left with just these 420 fish. Bearing in mind this pond started out as 22,000 fish, we're left with just 1.9% at 100 days old. I have managed to persuade Mark to pick three of his favourite fish from this spawning, and here they are. Let's take a closer look at each one. For me, I think the fish with the most potential is fish number two. However, all three of them have great qualities. Which one do you think is the best? Drop us a comment and let us know down in the comments section. In our next video, we'll find these three exact fish, see how they've developed, and which one looks the best. The koi we have decided not to keep and grow are still happy, healthy, pretty fish. They just don't have the quality of either colour, pattern or body shape we are looking for. A lot of people ask why koi can be so expensive, and that's because a good one is essentially a rarity. Everyone thinks that if you breed koi, they all look pretty, colourful and will be worth thousands of pounds each, but this is far from it. They are living works of art and everyone is different. These koi will now spend the winter in this building at a tropical 23 degrees. Optimum growing temperature for koi is 23 to 26 degrees, so we are providing them with the perfect environment for them to thrive. Combine this heat with good water quality, high quality food, and they'll grow at a rapid rate. The fish we decide not to grow on over winter are then made available for sale on the farm and on our website. It's crazy to think that in under four months, these fish have gone from unfertilised eggs into fully formed koi. Sadly, that's all we have time for in today's video, but if you want to track the progress of these exact fish, make sure you hit that subscribe button. We'll keep track of these fish over the coming months and be back for another video soon to see how they change, grow and develop. This is only the start and these incredible fish have an exciting journey ahead of them, one which we can't wait to share with you.