KOI SCRAPE | Checking a Mucous Biopsy For Flukes Under a Microscope | Elite Koi

Observation is the key to successfully bringing your Koi out of winter and into spring.
Water temperatures are rising across the UK now and Spring is a time of the season that can bring some challenges to Koi Keepers. Early reports are showing the usual outbreaks of Skin Flukes and a few cases of Trichodina.
Signs to look out for include but are not limited to :
· Koi clamping their fins
· Fish isolating
· Listlessness
· Excessive mucous
· Sores and ulcers
· Excessive flashing & flicking
· Raised scales
· Bulging eyes
This season at Elite Koi we have started to offer a free Scrape Service for our customers and members of our WhatsApp & Facebook groups. This service is free of charge but we have some strict guidelines around how it is used:
· Please never bring any fish (dead or alive) onto our shop premises without making a prior appointment.
· Once your appointment is booked we will give further instructions and make arrangements for you to bring your Koi.
· Your Koi must remain in the car and a member of our team (either myself, Chris, Michael or Dek) will come to your car to take the mucous sample.
· Please also note that we cannot scrape every Koi that you own and following your appointment discussion, we will agree how many Koi will be looked at.
If you have your own microscope we would recommend that you scrape a minimum of 3 Koi. If this is not acceptable please telephone your local Vet to take further advice from a Qualified Fish Health Professional. Our aim here is to simply offer a friendly free service for anyone who is having issues with their collections and possibly do not know where or who to turn to for help and advice.
Collectively Elite Koi have over 40 years of experience. We are also in the process of arranging further training for our staff and offering many more services such as Laboratory sampling of water parameters, Bacterial swab analysing and also PCR testing which will be offered in due course.
For more details please contact us by telephone on 07561 804 263.

[@GrahamTaylor123]

Nice tip about nitrite Chris 👍

[@leeoliver4063]

Nitrite is an absolute pain if it gets out of hand , normally new ponds and weak filters play apart in it but i made mistake once of topping water up 10% water changes sometimes more and my dechorinator had stopped working so every time i water changed i was getting chlorine in water killing filters off id check chlorine to

[@elitekoi]

One of the reasons we always top the ponds up very slowly and make sure the fresh water enters tge pond away from the filter media. Flow rates play a massive part when using dechlorinators and we are happy with a strong drip 👍

[@leeoliver4063]

@@elitekoi never even thought about slowing flow rate