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or stolen from the Camellia Club Newsletter, Koi Ahoy.

“ My greatest fear is that someday I will die and my wife will sell my koi for what I TOLD her I paid for them!”
Submitted by Jason Sargent

“ My neighbor raises Koi, too. They must be good ones, because he puts them in plastic bags and takes them places.“

Lonesome Fred's Rescue
By - TERRI NOEL

I received one of Phred Jackson's many emails about a Koi rescue. It said that someone had a lonely brown Koi named Fred that needed a home. He was the only Koi in a pond of various assorted fish. I didn't respond to that first email. When I received another koi rescue email it had a little PS attached saying that no one had responded to poor lonesome Fred.

I emailed his owner John and it turned out no one other than I had responded to his plea. It turned out Fred seemed to have a reoccurring fungus on his head at this time. The owner was going to treat the pond before he left on a business trip and we would get together in two weeks to catch Fred.

When I arrived at John's home I was shown to a lovely garden pond that had lots of plants, shubunkins, mosquito fish, minnows, a bull fish, an albino cat fish (hiding), and Fred. Fred was a beautiful 10 inch brown fish that had gold sparkles across his back. Needless to say everyone was hiding as soon as the nets went in the water. It took a little maneuvering and guiding to finally catch him but it went surprisingly quick with as many plants as there were to hide behind.

Fred made a smooth ride from Berkeley to Union City in an ice chest with a battery operated air stone. He moved from ice chest to quarantine tank in my yard. He was very social coming up to see me each time I went out check on him that afternoon and evening.

At 5:30 am the next morning I went out to feed and check on Fred. I looked in the tank and I didn't see him. I looked and looked as there was a cover on the tub. Then I saw my dog looking on the ground between my potted plants on the other side. All of a sudden I thought, “OH NO!!!“ Fred jumped out the two inch gap on the cover. Sure enough Fred was lying in between my plants on the cement. He had been out so long he wasn't even moving, not a tail flop, not a gill movement, not even a gasp. I was devastated. I thought to myself I took this family's Koi to give it a good home. I'm supposed to be sending them updates on how he's doing and now I have to say he's dead.

I picked up poor Fred's battered body and held him in the water to see if I could detect any life. For the first few seconds as I brushing debris off of him I didn't see any movement at all then I finally saw him lift his gill once, then nothing. My mind immediately began racing, “He's Alive!! He's Alive!!“ Not by much, in fact by the slimmest of threads, but alive.

I remembered an article I had read about someone‘s fish that jumped out because of low oxygen and she gave her fish artificial respiration. So I opened Fred's mouth and gently blew in a breath, then I held him upright in the flow path of the air stone, then I would move him in the flow path of the water coming out of the Rio pump. Repeat, Repeat and Repeat. Slowly but surely he began some gill movement every so often. Then I kept up moving him from air stone to the moving water from the pump for about an hour and a half. Near the end of that time he was gasping a bit so I made him suck on my finger. That was a technique that I had just learned about at the Koi Show from a demo reviving fish that were knocked out for treatment. That really helped to start to bring him around but he still couldn't stay in an upright position or move his fins.

At that point my hands and arms were getting a bit cold. So next I put him in a little pan with just enough water to cover him and added the battery operated air stone. I now had gill movement so I gave him a break long enough to make myself a bowl of Cheerios and soymilk. I next proceeded to sit at the kitchen table with Fred in the pan on my left and my cereal on the right. While eating my breakfast with my right hand I would alternate my left hand from putting a finger in Fred's mouth to holding him in an upright position with his face at the air stone. By the end of about 45 minutes Fred could keep his gills moving, stay in an upright position by resting on the bottom of the pan, move his front fins very slowly, and every so often give a lethargic swish of his tail fin. Of course the whole time I never stopped silently praying for Fred to make it or giving him an encouraging pep talk out loud. I was telling him, “Come on, Fred, you can make it, breathe, swim.”

I figured at this time I had given all that I physically could to help. I put him back in the tub added a large dose of NovAqua to help put back his slime coat that was gone and a dose of the antibiotic Amikacin that I had on hand.
Fred made it. It's been a week now. He's had three dose's of the antibiotic added every other day. The first day he was moving very stiffly, lots of scales off at the bottom, staying at the lower end of the tub, and not really eating. The second day I gave him a treat to eat of some brine shrimp which he greatly enjoyed. By the end of the week now the fungus on his head is gone. He's swimming all over the tub and eating well. The bumps and bruises look a lot better and he comes up to greet me once again whenever I go out to talk to him.