December 2005 Show Season Finale "Koi Club of the Air" Show Content
Calendar of Events
January 2006
28 &29 The 2006 Valley of the Sun Koi Club’s Annual Koi show is scheduled for January 28-29, 2006 in Phoenix, Arizona at the Chinese Culture Center. This is our third year to join the Greater Phoenix Chinese Week. This event culminates with a three-day festival filled with traditional food, activities, and entertainment. The festival attracts an average of 150,000 spectators each year in addition to local media coverage and festival advertisement. We give out 140 trophies from GC to 3rd place, a traditional Korean Barbeque Banquet, and seminars on water quality and gold fish judging. On Sunday at 130 PM we hold our annual Koi Auction. Come join us in the SUN this January! Phoenix, AZ Contact: Robbi McCleney 602-502-7125 mailto: rmccleney@cox.net; http://www.vskc.net
February 2006
4th & 5th Gainesville Koi Club Show. Kanapaha Botanical Gardens 9am - 3pm. Learn all about the art of Koi keeping from local knowledgable people and see an official English style judged show. A $5.00 admission charge is collected by the Gardens which entitles you to the Koi Show as well as touring the 62 acre Botanical Gardens and water features. "JOIN THE CROWD FOR THIS FUN FILLED TWO DAY EVENT" Kanapaha Botanical Gardens, Gainesville, Florida Contact: David Hardcastle/Joe White/Don Hellard 866-214-6248/386-767-0814/352-262-1571 mailto: wavenbye@atlantic.net; http://www.pondhoppers.org
Tropical Koi Club Show, Feb. 25-26! The 5th Annual Tropical Koi Club Show in Delray Beach, Florida to be held Feb. 25-26th! This year they will be participate in the Hatsume Festival at Morikami, the largest Japanese themed event in Florida. www.morikami.org Morikami Japanese Museum & Gardens Contact: Martin Wilcox 954-434-0135 wilcoxmartin@hotmail.com &
Tropical Koi Club at http://www.koifla.org for more info.
'Podcast' is word of the year
December 28, 2005
Quentin Reade
Podcast has been named word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary.
While only a year ago, podcasting was unknown by anyone other than a few techies and self-admitted "geeks", now a mass of broadcasts are available via download audio files called podcasts.
Thousands of podcasts are available at the iTunes Music Store, and websites such as iPodder.com and Podcast.net track thousands more.
The New Oxford American Dictionary defined podcast as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player."
Erin McKean, editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, said:
"Podcast was considered for inclusion last year, but we found that not enough people were using it, or were even familiar with the concept. This year it's a completely different story. The word has finally caught up with the rest of the iPod phenomenon."
Runners-up for the 2005 Word of the Year include:
Bird flu (an often fatal flu virus of birds, esp. poultry, that is transmissible from them to humans, in whom it may also prove fatal)
ICE (an entry stored in one's cellular phone that provides emergency contact information)
IDP (internally displaced person; someone forced to relocate within a country because of a natural disaster or civil unrest)
IED (improvised explosive device, such as a car bomb)
lifehack (a more efficient or effective way of completing an everyday task: "I found a great lifehack for getting a cheap hotel room.")
persistent vegetative state (a condition in which a patient recovering from a coma retains reflex responses and may appear wakeful, but has no cognitive functions or other evidence of cerebral cortical activity)
reggaeton (a Latin American dance music which combines elements of reggae music with hip-hop and rap.)
rootkit (software installed on a computer by someone other than the owner, intended to conceal other programs or processes, files or system data.)
squick (cause immediate and thorough revulsion: "was anyone else squicked by our waiter's piercings?")
sudoku (a logic-based puzzle consisting of squares that form grids within a grid. Into each smaller grid, the numerals 1 through 9 are entered but not repeated, and they may not be repeated in any row or column of the larger grid.)
trans fat (fat containing trans-fatty acids, considered unhealthier than other dietary fats.)
http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/news.php?id=72577
A Cautionary Tale
by Todo
I was in a local pet store the other day. This was a familiar place where I knew them and they knew me.. The shop keeper and his assistant were in intense conversation with a woman customer as I came near. The assistant turned to me and said, "You're a goldfish expert, what do you think about this?" I didn't bother to point out that I knew only something about koi and precious little about goldfish. In any event I listened to the problem.
"This lady is having trouble with worms in her aquarium. Do you know anything about them?"
It seems the customer had brought in a sample of the worms. I said I didn't know much but would help if I could. "Let's go see the worms."
Before I saw it I expected to see the red bloodworms that show up in our filters. The harmless larvae of the midge fly. Instead, there on the counter was a black/brown worm about an inch long. It looked more like a small slug without the slime or a snail missing its shell. On closer observation, it appeared to stick to the plastic bag it was laid on with a small round mouth part while the back end twisted, moving back and forth. There was a half dozen more of these sliding around a 5 gal bucket next to the counter.
As we examined the creature it became obvious what it was, a leach. The woman's 20 gal. aquarium was infested with leaches. The conversation then turned to how they managed to get into the aquarium.
I asked her if she had introduced anything to her aquarium. She and the shopkeeper assured me that she had not. But further discussion revealed that the woman had purchased some Anacrus from the shop. Further, the shopkeeper said that they get their plants from someone who takes them directly from the wild. Neither of them did any sterilization of them nor he did nothing to sterilize the plants before putting them up for sale. We decided that the leaches had to have come in with the plants.
We talked about how to sterilize plants with potassium permanganate or with a bleach solution. The shopkeeper said that perhaps the store should be doing that with the plants they get.
In the end the customer went home intent on watching her fish to see that no leaches grabbed them and with a healthy respect for what she puts in the aquarium. The shopkeeper was a bit chastened and lucky that the woman was not upset. To me it pointed out a fact that is often lost when dealing with otherwise familiar vendors. There is no substitute for quarantine and proper disinfect practices. In the end, you don't know where that plant has been.
Old Pond Syndrome
By Todo I remember the time I asked my mother what "The straw that broke the camel’s back" meant. Just a simple explanation would have sufficed, but Mom tended to the theatrical. Narration as she went, this ample Polish woman hoisted bundle after bundle of imaginary straw onto a fantastic gargantuan camel. Soon the poor beast would take no more and collaped in a heap, crushed spine and all. This image visits me every time the subject of Old Pond Syndrome (OPS) comes up.
OPS is the term for an established pond that suddenly falls apart for no apparent reason. Ponds easily accommodate normal environmental changes that fall within their range of health equilibrium. And, as long as the pond keeper is vigilant, this equilibrium can be maintain indefinitely. However, if not watched closely OPS can sneak up and destroy the pond.
As ponds mature subtle changes occur that have a profound effect on the pond’s well being. Fish grow. Filtration, adequate when fish were small, starts reaching its neutralization capacity when handling more solid waste and more ammonia. Aeration becomes inadequate as bigger fish require more oxygen. Parasites and bacteria, held off by the fish’s own immune system, become problematic as water quality deteriorates. A pond can teeter on the edge of disaster for sometime, waiting for that one event that will break its back
Pond crash triggers come in many forms. Even innocuous events may be enough to tip the balance: power outages, disease vectors like introducing an un-quarantined fish or diseased plant, ammonia concentration creeps up until it damages or even kills the filter, a cold snap or warm spell, going on vacation. The list is endless, but once OPS takes hold many fish are likely to die before that pond returns to balance.
A few Saturday’s ago a fellow called with a fish emergency. His koi had stopped eating three days before and developed some skin condition. My first question was, had he introduced any new fish in the past few weeks? He had, a small koi bought three weeks before.
Visiting his pond the next day exposed his real problem. He had 30 fish, some as long as 28 inches in a pond not quite 1000 gal. and only 28 inches deep. In short he had too many fish and too many big fish for his system. He was also under-filtered, under-aerated and had been feeding catfish food instead of a proper koi ration. His pond was balanced on the knife edge of an OPS crash and the introduction of an un-quarantined fish pushed it over.
No matter what we did to stem the tide of death, the vast majority of his fish died within a week. There is an old koi keeper’s adage: ten percent of your fish will survive any disease, but this is small comfort when the dying fish are yours.
The best way to deal with OPS is to avoiding it in the first place. This is not difficult provided that you do periodic water testing, maintain a proper fish load for the pond’s volume and filter, keep the pond and filter clean, encouraging algae growth on pond walls, introduce plants to the pond environment, feed properly and frequently observe your fish so if something changes you will see it.
