What factors affect how many Koi a pond can hold and does a Koi keeper have any influence over these factors? We reveal all there is to know about calculating the maximum number of Koi any pond can hold so you do not end up overstocking your pond and becoming a Koi keeper with Koi Carp for sale!
Successful Koi keepers are aware that their fish will not only consume dissolved oxygen from the water surrounding them but that they will also excrete waste products that have a negative impact on the quality of the water they live in.
Keeping a large number of fish within a small volume of water is likely to lead to a faster deterioration in water quality than when the same number of fish are kept within a larger volume of water. While keeping too many fish within a pond is likely to result in a deterioration of water quality, the number or weight of fish that any pond should contain – known as the stocking density — is still the subject of debate.
In the days before modern filtration systems, pond keepers believed that the level of dissolved oxygen was the most important factor to influence the number of fish their pond could hold. Although many of these early ponds incorporated a simple aeration system or even a rudimentary filtration system, the main source of oxygen was from the surface area of the water that was exposed to the atmosphere – a larger surface area enabled the transfer of larger quantities of dissolved oxygen and supported a larger quantity of Koi. Today’s Koi keepers are no longer restricted by dissolved oxygen levels, however, because modern filtration and aeration systems are better able to cope with the waste products produced by Koi.
RULES OF THUMB
Many early Koi keepers acknowledged the fact that larger fish or larger numbers of fish required more oxygen and therefore required a greater pond surface area. Although many of these Koi keepers appeared to adopt their own method of estimating this required surface area, a large proportion utilised the rule of thumb that every 2.5cm of a fish’s length required a surface area of 0.09m2 to enable the required concentration of dissolved oxygen to be maintained within the pond.
Although this method of estimating the number of fish does have a long history within Koi management, the advent of modern, efficient filtration and aeration systems has led to a far more accurate method of assessing the maximum stocking density of any pond.
NASTY NITROGEN
Modern filtration and aeration systems now enable Koi keepers to keep three or four times the number of fish that their early predecessors were limited to – any shortfalls or declines in dissolved oxygen can be overcome by adding a few airstones. The number of fish that any pond can hold these days is largely restricted by the capacity of its filtration system to break down or remove the nitrogen-based waste products that fish produce.
All fish produce these waste products as a result of them metabolising the food they are presented with. If these waste products are allowed to accumulate they are likely to have a negative impact on a fish’s health – they need to be removed or broken down by filters. Consequently, the number of fish that a pond can hold is now closely linked to either the level of water changes undertaken to dilute these waste products, or a combination of the size of the population of waste-consuming microorganisms that are encouraged to grow on the surface area of the biomedia and the turnover of water through the filter.
Ponds with a low turnover rate (less than once every two hours) are more likely to accumulate waste products at a faster rate than those ponds with a higher turnover rate (more than twice an hour) Consequently, ponds with a high turnover rate are usually able to stock more Koi.
Almost every Koi pond will also benefit from water changes to dilute these waste products. Most ponds appear to benefit from somewhere in the region of a 5% water change on a weekly or monthly basis. The higher the stocking level, the larger and more regular these water changes may have to be.
MEDIA SURFACE AREA
Many hundreds of thousands of pounds and millions of man hours have gone into calculating the surface area of biomedia required to sustain a population of fish. This research was based upon the fact that presenting fish with a certain amount of food would result in those fish producing a related amount of waste, and that this waste required a particular surface area of biomedia to accommodate the population of microorganisms required to break it down. While this research may now enable Koi keepers to calculate almost the exact surface area of biomedia that is required to break down any waste products, it has largely been confined to the closely regulated environment of a laboratory.
Unfortunately, the variation in conditions in even the most effectively managed Koi pond does render many of these calculations impractical for most Koi keepers. Accordingly, many successful Koi keepers and filter manufacturers will utilise the general rule of thumb that every 1kg of food that is added to a pond every day requires somewhere in the region of 200m2 of biomedia surface area to break down the associated nitrogen-based waste products.
The successful application of this rule of thumb may require Koi keepers to adopt a slightly different approach to estimating the total number of fish their pond can hold because this maximum limit is determined by the amount of food they add to the pond rather than its surface area. Any Koi keeper who wishes to adopt this approach within an existing pond would simply have to weigh the maximum, amount of food they add to their pond and then match this figure to the above rule of thumb. In the instance that the daily food ration exceeds the surface area of the media located within the biological filter, a Koi keeper would then be faced with the decision of either reducing the amount of food they add or reducing the number of fish their pond holds.
