Koi Color Food

Most people assume that to have beautifully colored koi it is necessary to use a color enhancing formula. The actual answer is…no. By definition, color foods are meant to bring up or enhance some color or hue. Best analogy of color foods is that they are like make-up for the fish. Before deciding whether to feed ones koi a “color” food, one should look to see if they actually need any improvement in the way their colors are showing. Majority of time, if the koi already get some krill and spirulina containing food such as either Premium or Premium Pro, they will never need to be fed a “color” formula. The Premium foods are categorized as show formulas. They just take effect in a more manageable (safer) fashion without risking blowing out the colors. A true color food is meant to be used as a fast coloring food which will deposit the right amount of pigment in the correct set of chromatophores in the koi skin in a relatively short period of time. Another words, feed over 1-3 weeks and not months.

Kin ki utsuri

Kin means yellow, yet this one looks more like a Hi utsuri. The cause here is that this Japanese breeder ordered too much Color Pro sinking food and his assistants kept feeding this food way past the point where it should have been discontinued. All of the kin ki utsuris from this pond returned to a golden yellow hue but it took a couple of months to get there. Some koi such as a shiro utsuri (black and white) do not have any chromatophores to actually deposit the carotenoid pigments into and as a result heir whites blow out with pink, yellow or beige hues making them dingy until this un-needed pigment fades away.

What if, on the other hand, one is walking a koi show and the announcer comes on over the PA system and starts describing koi varieties and says that a “Kohaku, ladies and gentlemen, is an orange and white koi.”? That’s when you know that some hobbyists do not feed a good quality food meant to keep the fish in peak condition. At a koi show level of display, all of the gosanke type koi (kohaku, sanke and showa need to be red and not orange. Care should be exercised (as with the kin ki utsuri example above) so the whites don’t get blown out and turn pink, beige or yellowish but that’s what eyes were made for.