Koi carp in New Zealand
- Thread starter Shirokuma
- Start date
it is quite easy for a zoo to get a permit to keep koi carp although I haven't seen them in a zoo myself for many years. They are really common in some places in the wild though so not hard to get hold of.
zooboy28
Well-Known Member
Koi Carp are kept at Wellington Zoo according to the census, but I'm not sure where.
Other carp species are kept in NZ zoos. Auckland Zoo has a large group of Grass Carp in the moat of the Ring-tail Lemur exhibit, and possibly elsewhere, I think they used to be in the Japanese Garden.
Other carp species are kept in NZ zoos. Auckland Zoo has a large group of Grass Carp in the moat of the Ring-tail Lemur exhibit, and possibly elsewhere, I think they used to be in the Japanese Garden.
I didn't know Auckland had grass carp. Both grass carp and silver carp require permits as well, but they can't breed in the wild in NZ due to needing specific spawning conditions so all the ones here are produced in commercial hatcheries (for weed control and food).
One of my old photos in the Wellington Zoo gallery is where the koi were back in the 80s/90s (later becoming the meerkat enclosure, but now removed entirely). I would imagine the koi there now, if they still have them, must be in the lake?
One of my old photos in the Wellington Zoo gallery is where the koi were back in the 80s/90s (later becoming the meerkat enclosure, but now removed entirely). I would imagine the koi there now, if they still have them, must be in the lake?
Are 'wild' Koi multi-coloured like the ones in Aquatic culture. i.e. do they retain their bright colours or somehow revert to duller ones? I imagine natural selection would weed out the brightest colours- but maybe there are no Predators?
Is it still illegal to keep things like Hamsters& Gerbils as pets in N.Z? I remember Mice and maybe Rats were okay, also Rabbits and GuineaPigs/Cavies, but not much else in that line.
I saw a large pond/small lake in Auckland somewhere a couple of years ago (I can't for the life of me remember exactly where!) which was chock-a-block with koi. The surface was almost boiling in places with the fish at the surface. Most were dark-coloured but there were other colours in there as well.
The way that reversion to wild colouration works is through the babies: brightly-coloured small fish are removed by predation (herons, kingfishers, etc) and mainly the dull-coloured ones survive to grow to adulthood.
Gerbils and hamsters are still illegal for private ownership and they probably always will be (they used to be allowed to be imported under permit for labs but I don't know if that is still the case, and I have never seen any myself). Rats, mice, chinchillas, guineapigs and rabbits are the only small mammals kept as pets here.
It looks as though nobody answered the query of Wellington Zoo's last Koi Carp, so I will proceed to necropost again. From the 2000s until at least 2014, Wellington Zoo's Koi Carp were kept in a pond that is/was within the outdoor Chimpanzee enclosure. Presumably this had two purposes; to get rid of the remaining Koi Carp, and to provide the chimpanzees with enrichment and a slightly more varied diet.