Koi Pond at New World Hotel, Manila (Pt 2)

 

I will be checking out from this hotel later today to catch a flight home. After my breakfast, I visited the koi pond again. There is a person cleaning the pond this morning. He was vacuuming the bottom of the shallow pond using a pool vac. This highlights the importance of having a good pond design. Features like bottom drains and venturi pipes strategically placed to create a water flow around the pond and moving detritus from the bottom drain will reduce or eliminate the need for such back breaking maintenance work.  Also, for a deep pond, walking around the pond to vacuum the bottom is impractical, if not impossible.

Another feature lacking in this hotel’s Koi pond is a surface skimmer. The surface skimmer serves to removes oil, scum, floating leaves, dead insects from the water surface Without a skimmer, the pond keeper may have to sieve such dirt out by hand.

This pond also houses several large catfishes called the pleco. The pleco feeds on algae and is a bottom feeder. They are also known to eat floating Koi pellets by swimming inverted at the surface. Some people believes the pleco helps to keeps the pond clean. I tends to disagree. What goes in, must comes out. While they clear the pond from algae or other plant material, they are also producers of waste.