How To Acclimate Your Koi?

Acclimating your Koi is a process of making your pet get used to its new surroundings and habitat. Acclimation is usually done to familiarize and make comfortable the newly acquired Koi, when it is brought home for the first time, and the process of introducing it to a completely new water habitat is at hand. The technique ensures the observance of a few critical factors, which help the species to quickly and easily adapt to their new surroundings without suffering any inconvenience.

Other possible reasons for the need of acclimating the pet Koi to their changed surroundings might arise, if you have a need to isolate the sick specimen from the pond, add the specimen as a new arrival in your pet pond, or have moved to a new place altogether.

Certain essential factors which need to be ascertained while acclimating your Koi, include,

• Equalizing and maintaining the water pH level.
• Equalizing of the temperature of the water present in the pond and the Koi transmittal bag.
• Balancing of the different water parameters.

The trick of how to effectively acclimate the Koi involves a series of steps which need to be carried out with care, so that the newly acquired specimen or transferred Koi, are easily able to adapt to their new surroundings, without suffering any discomfort with the change in water temperature and habitat conditions.

In order to familiarize the Koi with the new surroundings, the initial step involves floating the bag with the Koi inside, within the pond. This needs to be done for around 15 minutes, so that the temperature of the water is equalized.

Then the bag should be opened and around 25 to 30% of pond water needs to be added. The Koi bag is floated in the pond for further 15 minutes. Then the Koi is removed from the bag with the help of a net and added to the pond.

It is important to note that the water in the bag is not dumped into the pond water, as it is bound to contain parasites and bacteria, along with a relatively high toxicity level due to probable fish waste in the water. The act of dumping the water from the bag into the pond can contaminate the entire newly setup habitat, thus ruining the pH level and suitability of the pond for the Koi.