Platinum Grade A Koi Carp Cyprinus Carpio

Description

Platinum Grade A Koi Carp Cyprinus Carpio

The word Ogon (OH-gahn) translates as ‘golden’ and was historically used to refer to any metallic fish. However, nowadays, more and more koi keepers and breeders use the word ‘Ogon’ to refer to only single-coloured metallic koi. When most koi keepers hear ‘Ogon’ they tend to think of the Big Three Ogon koi which are the Yamabuki, Orenji and Platinum Ogons but many other Ogon koi varieties including the Mizuho and the Mukashi Ogons are becoming more and more popular.

The Platinum Ogon, known in Japan as the Purachina Ogon (POO-rah-CHEE-nah OH-gahn), first appeared in koi shows in 1963 but the breeding process began in the late 1940’s. All of the Ogon varieties were first bred by Sawata Aoki and his family who, over the next few decades, would go on to run one of Japan’s biggest and most well-known koi farms, Aokiya. For many centuries, Japanese people have considered gold and silver to be incredibly important and, in fact, considered them to be two of the national treasures of Japan. Aoki wanted to produce these colours in koi fish as he knew that they would be incredibly popular.

The Platinum Ogon koi was originally bred when Aoki bred a Kigoi (a light yellow, single-coloured koi) with a Nezu Ogon (a dark grey, metallic, single-coloured koi). This pairing led to the offspring having the metallic sheen from the Nezu Ogon as well as a lighter, sliver colouration from the dark grey of the Nezu Ogon combined with the light yellow of the Kigoi. That is, the fry looked like slightly darker versions of the Platinum Ogon koi we have today. Within about 15 years and a number of generations of this new variety, Aoki was able to gradually lighten the skin colour from the grey colour of the first generation to a lovely, clean silver. At this point, in 1963, Aoki first began to show his new variety to great success! People loved his new variety and over the next few decades, Aoki continued to develop the variety by lightening each new generation into the lovely snow-white Platinum Ogon koi we know today.