158 Milner Avenue, Roosevelt Park, Johannesburg
(GPS: S26º 08.541'; E27º 59.170')
Shop hours: 9am - 5pm Mon - Fri, 09:30 - 15:30 Sat
& some public holidays (Pls call to check). Closed Sun.

Mark 082 806 9444. William 082 886 7114

   
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Saki Hikari. The fish food of the All Japan Champions every year since 2003 (2004 show cancelled out of respect for the earthquake
in Niigata)  

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Previous articles here..

How fast do Koi grow?

It depends on conditions!

Genetics, food, water quality all play a role...

Getting Koi to grow big is part of the challenge of the hobby...

So you want to start keeping Koi? Welcome to the madness! This hobby is crazy so be warned! We put this page together quickly because we found the results interesting and that they validate our choice to import Hikari Koi food. So whilst this page is advertorial in nature we hope that it illustrates the point about the role of food and the sorts of things you can do to get your Koi to grow big and strong and win all the shows... 

Recently a customer of ours engaged his son in a school experiment for growing Koi. The aim was to see the difference that food, water, temperature and genetics play in influencing the growth rates of a Koi. As a matter of interest we had no actual hands on intervention in the project whatsoever - we just got the results one day handed to us - our customer had mentioned the project in passing and so all we knew was that it was happening and which foods we had recommended.  

Baby Chagoi from a single spawning that the customer had recently spawned himself were used. Two porta ponds were rigged up with identical filtration, flow rates and location. One (pond 1) was heated and maintained at a constant 22C whilst the other (pond 2) was left alone and fluctuated between 12 and 20C.

14 fish were selected for each pond. Each pond was given 7 fish that were deemed to be much larger than their siblings and 7 average sized fish.

Pond 1 was fed 30g of Saki Hikari Growth 5 times a day. Pond 2 was fed 50g of Hikari Economy once a day.

And of course we expected the results to be very different! But even so we were gob-smacked.  Utterly Gob Smacked. With a capital G S!

Pond 1 gained a total fish mass of 7200 grams, whilst Pond 2 managed a total mass increase of 1825 grams. The single biggest fish increase was in Pond 1 - an astonishing 1220 grams!

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which just goes to show how deceiving photographs can be. We checked this three times over! Length increased from 285mm to 390mm in this time frame of 50 days...

The salient conclusions are as follows:

Pond 1 was fed 7500 g of Saki Hikari Growth over the project period of 50 days with a total fish mass increase of 7200g for a 96% food to weight gain ratio! This is simply outstanding and now you know where your money goes with this food - straight into your fish! Body shape on these fish was superb, with ideal conformation and bulk - no fatty deposits and of course a massively improved fish activity and health.

Pond 2 was fed 2500g of Hikari Economy over the project period of 50 days with a total fish mass increase of 1825g for a 73% food to weight gain ratio - which is perhaps even more impressive given that this food is Hikari's entry level offering. Most importantly the fish were healthy, were active and although they did not have the bodies of their rivals in Pond 1 they were clearly in good shape reinforcing Hikari Economy as a good choice of food for  those of us who do not necessarily want show quality fish, but who want long term healthy Koi. Actually we knew that already based on customer feedback but it is nice to have it confirmed!

Please note that this is not a serious scientific experiment and even with these phenomenal results we fell short of Hikari's test lab results. Of course their test lab looks like something out of NASA and everything is weighed, measured and analysed to the 41st decimal point - way beyond the scope of this simple project.

But what really pleases us is that in a real world situation the foods prove themselves. Comparative advertising standards in our country sadly prevent us from doing comparisons with other foods - much though we'd love to! As we have always said, we don't care what you feed your Koi as long as you do so knowing that what you feed them is in their long term best health interest - which is the sole reason we import and sell Hikari!

The data for the results are detailed below and you can see the first 7 fish in each pond were selected as being of an average szie and quality - and the second 7 as being of superior size and quality. Note that quality is not only size related hence the size overlap between the fish - we wanted to see if within the same spawning the role of genetics in determining growth rates.

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Hope this has helped you understand a little about the nature of the Koi hobby. If you want to seriously grow your fish, multiple feedings when the water is warm is the way to go. Also, you can feed Koi pretty much as much as they can handle when they are in growth mode (i.e. when the water temperature is above 20C). If you want to show your fish fast growth rates are important but equally so you need a quality food to avoid ruining the body shape of your Koi. You can get some truly awesome growth rates with practice - but equally please make sure that your filter system is up to the task at hand!