Mystery of the Missing Koi

The day I lost a fish and found one

It is a good practice to do a count of your Koi daily. This is best done during the daily feeding. Fish could be lost through predation, jumping out of pond and, in the case of my first pond, lost through poor pond design.

The issue was with the use of wire mesh to cover my bottom drains. More sophisticated covers could have been used, and which I will recommend, but this being my first pond, I left it to the pond builder to implement a low cost, cut-to-size wire mesh simply placed over the bottom drain.

This works fine until a time when the wire mesh gets covered with algae growth. Koi feeding on the algae could dislodge it and that’s is probably what happened.

After seeing the dislodged wire mesh and seeing no evidence of a dead Koi and leftovers from a Koi predation around my pond, I suspect that my missing Koi has somehow gone into the filter through the bottom drain.

I am left with the task of opening my filter and removing all filter mats from my first filter chamber. Lo and behold, the Koi was found alive below the filter media in the first chamber and it was recovered.

The day I lost a fish and found half!

To prevent this from happening again, I tied lead weights (the kind used by fisherman in bottom fishing) to the wire mesh, and using its weight to keep the wire mesh down.

This seems to work for a few months, until one day, I found one of my Koi going Missing In Action again.

Apparently, my Koi had grown in size and power and is able to dislodge the cover again.

This time, I found a half decomposed Koi in the filter.

Lessons learnt:

• Do your counting diligently. Early detection saves lives.
• Don’t skimp on your pond design. Use a “proper” cover for your bottom drain. Commercially designed bottom drain covers are available here.