Had a lovely day relaxing yesterday.  Got chance to catch up on some reading. It was great.

After the losing our Koi on Sunday I was messaged on Facebook by an old family friend. She was having lots of problems with their fish. I went to school with their son Bradley who owns the fish and I offered my limited knowledge and use of a scope to see what was going on.

The pond, lovely a good size and so are the fish. But, they were pretty poorly.

I’ve kept Koi for 4 years now. and as soon as there has been the slightest odd behaviour from my babies, I’ve had the help of someone with a microscope. My local two dealers over the years, have called me paranoid and hard work lol… but I’ve known the bugs were there long before the outward signs were.

Our old school friends mum and my mum used to know each other very well, so my mum tagged along for a catch up, while I took a look at their fish.

It wasn’t hard to see that they had problems from looking at them, very heavily mucused up. So much so that they were practically blind. Bit like the Ogon I rescued earlier this year when we had flukes.

I caught their nice Showa, and took a sample from him. It practically dripped onto the slide. Yikes.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to find, the owner said it looked to her like their skin as coming off, this was just excess mucus, but on first look under the scope at 40x the problems were obvious.

Parasites, in the thousands.

To any other non Koi keeper Chilondonella and White Spot won’t mean too much, but for those of us who do know, we know how badly these fish have got it.

She had been trying to treat them, with some medication I’d never come across before. It did say on the packaging that it dealt with both those parasites, but with the mucus layer being so thick I don’t think it stood much of a chance.

I offered her my suggestions and am willing to go back to re-scrape in a week. Fingers crossed for them. They’re in a bad way.

Here is the Youtube link to the bugs… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVdICSrwNMw&list=UUcctES6g0AypmmSfuS2sRGQ&index=1&feature=plcp

I have no idea why, but this laptop wouldn’t show me what I was videoing as I was doing it, so it isn’t very good.

I also need some new lenses… but it gives you an idea of the numbers of bugs involved.

Today, we decided to take a little ride to Quality Nishikigoi I had the pleasure of speaking to Tim earlier in the week over my shusui and wanted to see where his place was.

Very impressed with the gentleman there, Paul. And their whole set up. Some very clean and nice koi. I will more than likely be going back 🙂

Now I am going to enjoy the rest of my day, cleaning my filters and looking after my own Koi. 🙂

Catch you soon.