Growing on Fish

[site admin]

Colin,
I said that the calculations for the amount of waste produced, might not be accurate.I think the decimal point was in the wrong place.
This might be more like it:
"When the water is warm, Koi can excrete between 50 and 100 mg of ammonia per kg of Koi bodyweight daily"

"As Koi grow larger, and the numbers of Koi in the pond remain the same, the load on the filtration system increases exponentially. A 60cm Koi places 8 times as much load on the filter system as a 30cm Koi does because it weighs 8 times as much!"

Dave.

[roselanekoi]

Hi Dave,

After a bit of searching I found the following info on the Mankysanke website.

http://www.mankysanke.co.uk/html/ammonia_.html

A guide to the quantity of Ammonia that is excreted by an active Koi is 33 mg per hour per kilo of body weight. To put that a little more simply, a 1 kilogram Koi will excrete almost 800 mg of Ammonia into it’s pond each day. This is obviously only an approximation because it is dependent on diet and water temperature etc. but it is a surprising amount nonetheless.

This figure doesn't include any additional ammonia coming from decomposing fish waste. It's no wonder the ammonia level rises rapidly when koi are placed in a new pond.

Colin