Coy about koi
Francisco “Paquito” Unchuan and his koi collection: I buy koi simply because I have learned to love collecting them. It is very relaxing.
I really love animals — except fish. I have horses, dogs, chickens and birds. I grew up surrounded by animals on our farm,” Francisco “Paquito” Unchuan, owner of White Sands Resorts in Mactan, Cebu, explains. He never owned an aquarium in his life, yet he decided to start a collection of koi, selecting the most vivid and attractive patterns. Paquito constructed all of five large ponds at White Sands Resorts for koi. “I buy simply because I have learned to love collecting them. It is very relaxing and one is de-stressed after spending hours just sitting there looking at them,” he says.
“We started White Sands Resort in 1995,” he recalls. “By the year 2000, we wanted to put a koi pond on the second floor just like the SSS building in Cebu — it had carp in the building.”
He doesn’t believe in “showing off” his koi, though. “I did not go into collecting koi just to join shows. I am sad when koi get very stressed as they are transferred from pond to container to pond. It is not good for them. Others join shows for the money or to be known as a koi collector. Even if my koi is a sure winner, I don’t want to take it out to travel” he says.
“I started with 70 koi, the cheap ones that did not have nice patterns, and started breeding them. I just needed fish for my pond. Koi do not look good when put in an aquarium because the colors and patterns are on their backs,” notes Paquito.
“Transferring koi stimulates them to lay eggs. Within three to four days, the female koi will start laying eggs between midnight to sunrise; usually it will start at 2 a.m. When breeding koi, you need three stainless bowls into which the sperm is squeezed and where the female koi is released,” Paquito gamely tells me.
“In Japan, they have a very shallow mud pond about two feet deep where they will breed a champion female with a champion male. Once the fingerlings hatch, they will get nutrients from the mud pond just by opening their mouths. After a month they will all be harvested. Eighty percent will be eliminated and only the best ones will be saved. We Filipinos would say sayang, but the Japanese do that because they are very strict with quality. They won’t even keep them to sell cheap at pet shops. But the high-end koi, the top-grade, they will sell at koi shows and those are usually not available to anyone except the Japanese,” explains Paquito.
His daughter, Anya, once complained that “the koi pets we had were so unattractive and at best, ordinary-looking. (I told) my dad he should upgrade what he has.”
So upgrade, he did. “My daughter and I went to a koi show in Cebu where I met Michael Hernandez and that was the start of my obsession with koi,” according to Paquito. “The following day, after the show, two of the judges came to my resort and told me that my koi were very ordinary-looking and unattractive!” he says. “Before, if one or two of my koi died in a year, that would already be too much for me! When I bought four koi from the show, I quarantined them for only one day, after which I put them in the main pond. Soon I was told that some of the koi were already tilting. My first question was, have they eaten and I was told by the caretakers that they had been fed.” This was in 2012. “I lost all of them. When they were bringing the koi out to bury them, I asked the caretakers to count them and I was told that there were over a thousand dead koi as all the five ponds were contaminated. I can say I learned the hard way. Eventually, I found out how to care for them better. Mistake No. 1 was that I did not separate my healthy koi and left them in the same pond as the sick ones,” he explains.
“The caretakers were so sad as they had grown attached to them and had given them names already,” laments Paquito. “Mistake No. 2, I shouldn’t have fed the sick koi because instead of fighting the disease, their energy, which is not very much, will all go to digesting their food,” Paquito notes. After over a thousand of his koi died, Paquito contacted Brixel Martinez to help him start importing new varieties from Japan. “He told me that I can get brighter, rare-patterned and healthier ones there. On March 26, 2013, the first batch arrived.” He went to Japan in October last year to purchase better-grade koi at much lower prices. “October is the harvest season for their big koi, and I paid 30-40 percent less than what I would have paid here,” he adds. Michael Hernandez, then considered the guru of koi keeping, came to see Paquito’s ponds in White Sands Resort and suggested that they should be six-feet deep. “So I raised the walls by at least two meters to create an ideal habitat for my koi,” adds Paquito.
No one really knows how koi collecting became a hobby, but common belief holds that it started in Niigata Prefecture in Japan. In the beginning, about 500 years ago, the mountain people of Niiagata started raising koi in their rice fields and harvested them every planting season when they reached six to eight inches. They then salted them for consumption during the winter months. Sometime in the 1800s, the farmers noticed that the very plain koi in their rice fields had developed vivid, brilliant and curious patterns. “The Japanese were very enterprising, so when the farmers noticed the change in colors of the koi, they stopped eating them and started breeding them with other koi that had also developed attractive patterns,” notes Paquito. This, it seems, was the start of koi collecting as a hobby. “Large Japanese koi dealers always reserved their best koi for special buyers. My best koi, on the other hand, are available for everyone,” he says. A koi brocaded carp usually costs between P2,500 to P5,000 depending on the quality. Top-grade, high-quality champion koi meanwhile fetch anywhere from P150,000 to P200,000 or more per fish! And if you ask Paquito, they’re worth every peso. Indeed, sitting near the pond gazing at a koi collection is a genuinely wonderful experience.
In this day and age of stress, conflict, aggravation and hostility, the sound of splashing water and the visually appealing colorful patterns of koi moving gracefully can increase our endorphin levels, creating a more creative, contented, serene sense of well-being.
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Email the author at nikkicoseteng2017@gmail.com or text her at +639974337154.
