A tranquil night at the pond – screenshot from Koi360.com video.
Spring is in full swing, and the garden centers around here are busy selling pond plants! We can tell aquarists are heading outdoors already, and in every respect, pond season is here.
A couple weeks ago I presented some ideas and inspiration for small, container-based ponds. My project has hit at least one roadblock, but I’m not giving up just yet! While wading through the Internet, I also stumbled upon some impressive footage of a much larger, very high-intensity in-ground pond from Koi360.com.
The pond itself is roughly 60 square meters, or nearly 16,000 gallons, with a depth of 2.2 meters (7.2 feet). It was professionally installed by a Thai company, KlickAquatech, and I presume the pond itself is located in Thailand.
This first video, shot at night, is about as tranquil a scene as I can think of for a Koi pond–and check out the amazingly clear water!
Even with the waterfall running, check out the amazingly clear water!
Want to get a look at this pond’s life support? The owner provides a full walkthrough of the filtration, which highlights movable/moving bed biological filtration, becoming commonly known as K1 Kaldnes media, which is tumbled (either by air or water, or both) and said to be self-cleaning. This filtration method has recently been making headway into the marine aquarium trade more than anywhere else (I have a couple Bashsea Bio Reactors in my fishroom, tumbled by water and air), but it is firmly rooted in pond-keeping. UV sterilizers also play an important role in keeping this pond clear of algae. The entire pond’s volume is turned over once per hour.
You can get another, longer overview of the pond in this video, which also shows the fixed bed portion of the filtration as well as more of the overall filtration system:
There are many more videos in Koi360’s channel, including a few showing the cleaning of the “fixed bed” portions of the filtration. Do you love the fern border as much as I do? Turns out there’s a nice mist/drip irrigation system in place to keep those plants growing lush. Ultimately, I think the people behind this backyard pond created a beautiful private refuge.
After watching all these Koi videos, I happened to notice that Koi360 had also uploaded a video featuring Red Bee Shrimp. All of a sudden, I made the unavoidable aesthetic connection between a koi pond and a shrimp tank!
So…if you can’t install a 16,000-gallon koi pond in your back yard, perhaps it’s time for something like a riparium full of Red Bee Shrimp?!
Video & Image Credits:
