SO SOCAL: The Best...The Beautiful...And The Bizarre : Fish and Chips

Following the disappearance of 60 koi fish from Descanso Gardens in La Canada some years back, The Times reported the advent of a LoJack-like system to protect these thousands-of-dollar specimens against future abductions. The implantation of a rice-sized, glass-encased silicon chip in the fish would allow the garden to track down and identify its kidnapped koi. So SoCal decided to investigate the effectiveness of this ingenious device.

We start at the scene of the koi caper. “That’s the first I’ve heard of that,” says Jerry Poe, a staffer in the visitor’s center. (He’s polite, but it’s clear from his amused tone that he thinks we’re a little nutty.)

Joyce Glenn, editor of fish-fanatic friendly “Koi U.S.A.” magazine, admits she’d “never heard of such a thing.” We go to Jon Rasmussen, a San Gabriel koi pond designer. “It sounds kind of insane,” he says.

Hmm. Is there some great carp conspiracy from which we, mere landlubbers, have been excluded? Rasmussen does relate the apocryphal tale of a homeless man who snatched $10,000 specimens from the backyard ponds of the well-to-do, but not to sell on the black market--he grilled them on the hibachi for his hungry family.

The mystery unravels when we find an unassuming koi collector loitering about one of Rasmussen’s ponds. He says he heard a rumor that Descanso “stopped using that system pretty much immediately after it started. The chip implants were killing the fish.”

Armed with the information, we return to Descanso, where Poe has asked around a bit since our last conversation. He’s discovered that there was an experimental program, “on the heels of a rather large theft, but it was a random thing. As far as I know, it wasn’t harmful to the fish.”