Then you see breeders with 50 koi in 1000 gallon tubs. Lol.
The key is always and will always be filtration.
Why is it that all the famous YouTubers with the best dedicated sleeper ponds and Baki showers and rdf’s and nexus filters and low koi count have the most issues with health and parasites?
Kind of an odd question you asked, by asking that you are inferring that having more koi you will have fewer issues. It is an age old question as far as how many koi you can keep in whatever set up you may have. There are many guidelines that people use.
@addy1 used one rule of thumb, others will say 1 koi for the first 1k gallons and 1 for every 250 gallons thereafter. Others use gallons per inch of fish you have. They are all guidelines and will depend on a lot of variables.
Yes, filtration is important and how much you have will determine the amount of fish you should have. But also factoring into that is how much you feed them, what type of food you feed them, amount of plants you have in the pond, etc. You should not use breeders as an example of what you can keep in a home pond. They do have insane filtration for their tanks but even with that they can have issues (see Next Day Koi earlier this year), but more importantly the breeders are obviously not keeping them long term, so the fish are not in that environment very long (if they were then the breeder is not doing a great business).
People forget how large koi can get and how many babies they can have, it can look like they have a lot of space when they are young in a 1000 gallon pond but in a few years that gets very crowded. There are definitely people out there that have been able to maintain a lot of fish in a small pond. It takes a lot of work and very little margin for error. When people here who have had a lot of experience (
@addy1 ,
@Lisak1 ,
@Mmathis and many others) give these guidelines it is because they have seen so many posts from new members saying "my fish were doing great for years and then all of a sudden....." It can take time for overstocking issues to show. They are not saying that if you add a sixth koi all of them will die the next day. It is just that you will have potential problems down the road and maybe the fish do not live quite as long as they have lived if they were not overstocked.
