The Elusive Ki Shusui

When you ask the Japanese how things happened in breeding a new variety, they can’t explain it, but credit it to their passion to make it happen.

There was a small spring in the center of what became the front yard. The previous tenants had watered their heifers there, but I envisioned a pond, a reflecting pool that would mirror the sky, the sunsets, the amazing cloudscapes. One day I thought it would be better yet to have fish in this pond and the journey to ki shusui began. I joined Koiphen, social media for koi lovers. I learned about the different varieties of koi and I fell for a type called shusui.Shusui means “Autumn Sunset,” because it has pale blue to white color skin with red bands on its sides, rising up toward the dorsal ridge and the double row of indigo blue scales. So, it loosely resembles an autumn sunset. I bought several shusui, and one I called Rosie really lit me up. And at about that time, 2008-9, I found out that there was a yellow shusui, called ki shusui. For many reasons, this is a difficult variety to achieve, and the few available for purchase were not picture perfect.I guess I fell hard for the ki shusui, and because there were none to be had, I decided to try to breed my own. I put in more ponds and soon I had a million gallons of fresh, aerated water, and some shusui and other promising fish to cross them with. I was incredibly lucky. Offspring from those first spawns produced the lovely fish I desired, the one known as “the elusive ki shusui.”

 

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And Now a Word From My Mentor…

I joined Koiphen (a message board), so that I could meet other koi aficionados and learn about koi and I sure did. I learned as much as I could and one of the people I met on Koiphen was not only kind and knowledgeable, but she let me know how I was doing.

Here’s a note she wrote to me when I was about three years into my obsession with Ki Shusui.

“The most often quoted genetics to use to produce Ki Shusui is Midori x Midori. You didn’t do that with your 2012 spawn.

Fact. No one has bred as many Ki Shusui as you in one season and certainly not to the quality of yours.

Not even Japanese breeders who have had generations of experience and far more access to water and parent fish than you. No one has bred this high a quality or number of Ki Shusui in one spawn ever! Let alone an American woman koi breeder. You went with your gut in creating them. Go with your gut in refining them and creating more.

You did research on how to breed what you wanted. You found sparse info on how they were originally developed and decided to follow what you could find. You purchased whatever suitable fish along those lines that you could find to try and recreate this rare variety. Your first attempt was a huge learning curve but you had some success. After more research, as well as using you skills of thinking outside the box, you formed a plan to start from scratch and develop your own base parent set in an attempt to limit unknown genetics from the gene pool so you could start off on your own quest with a purer form of base parent fish.

In the first spawn of these new parent koi, you discovered that the original map to create Ki Shusui was not the only way to do so and had outstanding success by producing some very good quality Ki Shusui from the spawn that was only to be the first step.

By being innovative and choosing parent fish that had the traits you wanted to combine, you’ve managed to leap at least two generations of the hard work of refining your new line of Ki Shusui and are now working towards increasing you Ki Shusui stocks by planning the breeding of the next generation.