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This is my third year trying to breed wakin. the first year a predator (my husband thinks it was one of our own cats) got my only female. I got about 11 decent baby wakin that year as she was spawning when she disappeared but aside from that, I was brokenhearted because she was one sweet fish! She ate out of my hand and followed me around the pond and just was really really friendly.

At that point I had 2 large males and several smaller wakin of undetermined gender. I thought 2 might be female and I was right but they were so much smaller than my males that I didn't want to risk them spawning so I kept them separated and I bought a new large female breeder and I paid a LOT for her. ($200.00) I named her Kerai which is Japanese for beautiful. I also got 2 babies that turned out to both be females but they aren't quite the high quality that this one is. The first time she spawned she got a bad tail injury and spent the rest of the year in the girls pond recovering. I only got about 16 decent wakin and about as many single tails and a few just really odd wakin type tails where they don't split right at the top.

I have found out however that even the single tailed wakin are still really nice pond fish. The body type looks pretty much like a common goldfish although they seem to get bigger and fatter but the ones that have patterns have really clean patterns and really brilliant reds and whites so unlike common goldfish they start to look really koi-like as they start to get big. A very small percentage come out solid red. A good solution for someone that wants koi, doesn't have the room for koi and doesn't want to spend big bucks for my nice wakin. I sell the single tails cheap but I was afraid that I would have to cull them all which is something I really hate to do.

Kerai spent the whole winter just with the other girls and was just added to the main pond 2 weeks ago. I only left my most perfect male BB King in the pond with her an 3 other females but he likes her. They spawned for a day and then unfortunately I went out yesterday morning to check on her and dammit if she doesn't have a very small tail tear in the same spot! GAH!! Since there are 3 other females in the main pond and only one big male bully I removed him this time and put him in with the other 2 girls that never seem to get hurt, but that I really don't want to breed as they don't have the fabulous tails.

My experience so far has been that both parents don't necessarily need to have perfect tails to get some offspring that have perfect tails but I am still getting as many bad tails as good ones from the general population mix and I don't like that ratio so I was hoping that by pairing 2 perfect specimens to see my ratio improve. However every time these 2 get together so far she gets hurt.

Maybe it's the esthetically beautiful perfect tail on this female that's the problem. I'm starting to think that if I want to breed these two particular fish that I'm going to have to do it by hand like the pros do. Now where could I learn something like that? I'm thinking maybe the local koi club could help get me pointed in the right direction but I don't know. Gonna try and find out. I don't have a problem handling fish, especially goldfish. Wakin are so much easier and more tolerant than koi, not to mention the size factor. Sigh, all is not lost. It's still very early in the season and I caught the injury very small this time. It's only about of an inch long I would say so I think it will heal up fast. If it heals soon enough I may try a controlled spawn with her and BB since I have no idea how to hand strip and it would break my heart if anything happened to Kerai as she's become one of my favorites. I would just watch the whole time they were together and remove her (or him) instantly if she got hurt.

So that's my plan for now. Luckily I now have plenty of females that are pretty good sized. Most of them are not quite as big as the males but 2 of them still have pretty nice tails although not quite as nice as Kerai's

Here's a pic of Kerai


And BB King