Two generations have been spawned since 2012 and I am now about four years from my goal of being able to cross a pair of ki shusui and get a high percentage of ki shusui offspring. Target date is 2021 -2022! Why I'm doing this.
I fell for shusui. I loved everything about this variety. It just spoke to me. When I learned that there was a yellow version of shusui, "the elusive ki shusui," I couldn't find any.
I found a photo without attribution to a breeder or anything about the fish, itself. You can see that iconic ki shusui on the front page of my web site. By 2009 I had learned that if midori is crossed with midori, ki shusui was sometimes produced as a byproduct. The formula for midori is shusui x doitsu ogon. I purchased midori, shusui and ogon from Japanese breeders and added in "a twist" of doitsu lemon hariwake.
I was trying to build "a line" of midori, and cross them with hopes of ki shusui as a byproduct to use in a breeding program going forward. If I couldn't buy ki shusui, perhaps I could breed them.
By 2011 I understood that the "twist" of hariwake, a metallic koi, created kin sui, a metallic shusui. This wasn't the goal. So I started again. I purchased the grandparents of the offspring on this page: three female shusui, two male doitsu lemon ogons, and a male midori -- and I restarted the project with those seven koi.
In the spring of 2012, these seven Japanese koi spawned in a quarantine tub in my basement and the eggs were transferred to a mud pond where they hatched -- 365 fry. I expected to get loads of midori -- shusui x ogon was the formula for midori --and I did! Of the midori, some were a luminous lime color. Some of them had blue dorsal scales.
But along with the many midori, there was an unexpected outcome.
The fish I had selected for the ki shusui project reboot produced not only midori, but several dozen ki shusui-type offspring. Some were ki shusui, some were ayawakaba. Ayawakaba is a similar to ki shusui. It comes from the same genetic cross of shusui x ogon, and midori x midori, differing only in that in ayawakaba, the signature yellow bands of ki shusui, cross the dorsal line.
In other words, by finding so many ki shusui and their genetic twins, ayawakaba, we skipped a generation of crossing midori x midori, another of refining the offspring of that cross and saved a minimum of four years. We had ki shusui to work with and those 2012 ki shusui offspring (F1) are the parents of the (F2) youngsters shown here.
Breeding these koi has been an amazing experience.
Watching thousands of babies grow in a 150,000 gallon mud pond has been joyful. They have schooled, made beautiful swim patterns in the water, were easily trained to come to feed and made cute little clacking sounds at dinner. I was sorry to have to reduce their numbers, but the best of them now have room to grow and the remainder have gone to live in mud ponds here in Dutchess and Columbia Counties, New York
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In May 2018, we'll cull again, and then, again, in October, further consolidating desirable traits in an attempt to produce a stable breeding line of ki shusui.
To the best of my knowledge, this has not been done before.
