A Fish Story : Owners Go to Great Lengths and Depth for Koi

Banker Bob Bonner sat at his dining room table leafing through the plans for what may be the biggest hand-dug, back-yard hole-in-the-ground in Reseda.

When it’s done and filled with water, a visitor asked, how many koi will be in there?

“Oh, about a hundred.”

In the kitchen, Jeff Hirshfeld laughed and shook his head in disbelief.

“Sure,” he said, “like we’re going to stop at a hundred.”

Beyond the dining room window yawned The Hole.

Two and a half years ago, when they started to dig in their back yard, it was planned as a nice little pond for waterlilies and maybe a few goldfish.

But Bonner and Hirshfeld, who is an insurance adjuster, went past the nice little pond stage. Far past. Now the hole is over their heads. It is so deep they can’t see out of it and so wide it practically is the yard. If it were filled with water, the hole would hold almost 20,000 gallons--more than many back-yard swimming pools.

And the koi-obsessed duo is still digging.

Koi, the spectacularly colorful fish prized for centuries as pets in Asia and the Middle East, are coming into their own in Southern California. The membership rolls of koi clubs are growing, the number of home-based koi importers are on the rise, and several nurseries have begun to carry pond supplies.

“Everyone has already done dogs and cats,” said Alex King, who runs a koi import business out of his Lancaster garage. “It was time for something new.”

Koi won’t fetch the morning paper or crawl into your lap while you are watching the tube, but fans claim that the fish are intelligent, come to recognize their owners and even eat out of your hand. But koi keeping is not just about fish.

Get some koi folks together and the talk quickly turns to filter systems, parasites, ammonia removers, aeration pumps and other topics guaranteed to glaze the eyes of the uninitiated. Many hobbyists even make their own filtration systems out of PVC pipe, plastic barrels, various types of filtering mediums and electric pumps.

“Once you get involved in koi, you better watch out,” said Bonner, who is president of the 200-member Ikiru Hoseki koi club in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys. The club name is Japanese and means “Living Jewels.”

Collectors of rubies and sapphires lock their obsessions away in velvet-lined jewelry boxes. The koi compulsives dig holes in their back yards.

“You get hooked and then it is all over,” said Bonner. “Next thing you know there is a very big hole in your back yard and you are dreaming about new filter systems.”

Until Bonner and Hirshfeld complete their project--which will include a 25,000-gallon pond, an adjacent waterfall and stream system, granite boulders, bog gardens, a bridge and a 1,200-square-foot addition to their house designed for optimum viewing of the water environs--the koi they presently have reside in large plastic tubs under shade cloth on the edge of the yard.

They have named several of them--one is Charo, another is Tanuki (badger in Japanese) and another called Gamon, which had to be nursed back to health.

“If anyone would have told me a few years ago that I would be emotionally involved with a fish,” Bonner said, “I would have said they were nuts. But when that fish got sick, I really went through it.”

Few get hooked on such a grandiose scale as Bonner and Hirshfeld. But for many, koi becomes almost all-consuming. Joe Estrada, a respiratory therapist, has already spent about $8,000 on a back-yard waterfall, boulders and stream bed--all made of fiberglass--that he had installed at his tract home in Quartz Hill in the Antelope Valley. He is now putting in a 4,500-gallon fiberglass pool, which is sold as a swimming pool, for his koi.

“It’s all part of that cocooning thing,” said Estrada, wearing a Makita tool cap as he gave a tour of his future koi oasis. “People have bigger lots up here, so they have room to put in and enjoy a setup like this.”

Local nurseries are responding to the interest. “When I took over the nursery they didn’t have koi at all,” said Jacklyn Nagasawa, owner of a nursery in Sunland. Until the early 1980s, the nursery, which she took over from her grandfather, specialized in cactus. The business now deals exclusively in pond fish and plants, prompting Nagasawa to change the nursery’s name to Sunland Water Gardens.

Nagasawa’s koi, which she sells at the nursery for $3.50 to $3,000 each, are obtained from Asia and domestic sources. She now buys about 300 fish a week on the wholesale market--that’s up about 25% from last year.

“There is much more interest in water gardens in general these days, but koi is the part that is really growing,” she said, sitting on the edge of a large concrete pond that was screened on the top to keep the larger koi from jumping out. “It’s more and more of my business.”

With koi comes a mass of equipment and additives to keep them healthy. Tetra, one of the biggest companies offering pond liners and other products used by koi fans, has increased its Southern California business 200% this year, according to local sales representative Warren Wong.

“A lot of it is because of the end of the drought,” said Wong, who has represented the German-based company here for three years. “People who have wanted a pond for a long time but were afraid to get one are now doing it.”

Not putting in a pond because of the drought makes sense only psychologically, according to the pond experts. They say that a pond, once filled, uses far less water than the same size lawn or plant garden because only water lost through evaporation needs to be replaced.

Koi ponds are far from maintenance free, however. The water needs to be filtered and aerated 24 hours a day. “It’s like dialyses patients,” said Barbara Johnson, who has a pond maintenance service known as Barbara the Fish Lady. “If the filter system doesn’t work, the patient dies.”

Koi are subject to a number of maladies caused by parasites or bacteria. Although they are usually too big to be nabbed by a cat or a bird, they can fall victim to raccoons and other predators that wander into the yard.

Johnson, who said she takes care of about 150 local ponds, including those of film directors John Badham and Richard Donner, advises novices to expect a few casualties, especially at first. “I tell them not to name the fish until they really know what they are doing,” she said. “It’s always the favorite that goes first.”

These fish that are lavished with so much attention and care do not have a fancy biological pedigree. They are of the Cyprinus family that are, in more common terms, carp. But koi have undergone carefully monitored mutations to enhance their vivid coloring and patterns.

“If you put them in some pond and let them go for a few generations, they would go back to being ordinary carp,” said King. As ordinary carp they are worth little, especially in this country where they have never been prized as a food fish. But a prized koi is a different story. You would not want to eat one, no matter how good it tasted.

“There are a lot of fish stories out there about how expensive koi get, but there is truth to it,” said Bertrelle Caswell, past president of Ikiru Hoseki and the grande dame of koi hobbyists in Southern California. “I’ve been to shows in Japan where the fish went for a few hundred thousand apiece.

“And I know that there was one being offered there for over $1 million. From its picture it looked perfect in absolutely every way: its shape, its color, its pattern. I have never seen another one like it. To give up something like that, you ask a price.”

Caswell’s elaborate but serene 80,000-gallon pond system at her San Gabriel home has been profiled in several magazines and most recently on the PBS “Victory Garden” show. It has been one of the prime sources of inspiration to koi hobbyists. Seeing her ponds, with their huge koi that indeed eat out of her hand, was all it took two years ago for Bonner and Hirshfeld to greatly expand their water garden plans.

“All the time people ask us what we get out of this,” said Hirshfeld. Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, he was just in from working in the yard and was on his way to the local hardware emporium for more supplies. “It’s just very, very soothing. It’s the kind of thing you need at the end of the day.”

Relaxation was mentioned as the main motive by almost everyone interviewed who has a koi pond, big or small.

“With all the stress and strain in the world, there is nothing like sitting out by a pond and watching these very quiet pets swimming around,” said Chris Bushman of North Hollywood, who teaches a beginners’ class for the local chapter of Zen Nippon Airinkai (All Japan Fish Appreciation Society), a Japan-based koi club.

But what if one got tired of koi after a while? What if you put in a huge water system and later wanted to move?

Bonner and Hirshfeld said that with a change of filter systems, their project could be converted to a swimming pool. But they don’t envision a move.

“After all this work?” Bonner asked. “The next time I move into a new place, it will be feet first.”