The Koi

To say I love the Koi is an understatement. As a child I used to spend time in the pet store looking at the hamsters, gerbals and fish. There was this enormous giant pond with only Koi and I'd spend absoloutly ages with them. Something was just so magnificent about them.
Perhaps it's their colours, their size or their anatomy. But something attracted me to them, something graceful.

 http://yuumei.deviantart.com/

I never thought much about them after the pet store closed down, nor did I know their name. Until I found the digital artist Yuumei (who has since won awards and the DeviantArt artist of the year award). She focused a lot on Koi's a lot, which symbol love and friendship in Japan.

The Koi is a coldwater fish that in winters hardly ever eats. It's variant colours have made them good for collecting and decoration in ponds. Many will pay large sums of money for one specially coloured Koi. Another special fact about a Koi that was 225 years old, which Koi's die around their 50's, owned by several owners. It goes by the name of Hanako.

The Koi has been selectivaly bred for a thousand years and thus created the goldfish. It was to small, lack of colour and different shaped to be called a Koi anymore. Plus the golfish can't breed with the Koi, as it now a different form of carp.