Koi fish

Welcome to Koi For Dummies, a book designed for two purposes — to tell you about the beautiful fish known as koi
and to make koi-keeping so simple you’ll wonder why you didn’t pick up this hobby eons ago.

What’s so much fun about koi? They’re gorgeous fish, and they’ve been selectively bred for more than a hundred years for color, pattern, size, and harder-to-pin-down qualities like grace in swimming or personality. They’re the fish version of lilies of the field, perfect on their own merits. For years they’ve been called living jewels, although we, your authors, find that term a bit on the syrupy side.

Nothing quite compares with koi. Parrots are pretty and can tame down, but they’re noisy. Orchids are attractive, we’ll grant you that. But after an orchid’s bloomed, the pretty stuff’s over for a couple of months. And we haven’t seen an orchid yet that takes food from our fingers or rolls over to have its belly gently rubbed. So these are some of the reasons we find koi so much fun. We hope you will, too.