Kilifish Spawning

Day 180 of writing every day.

Summer is the spawning season for kilifish, Japan are kept as pets in some households in Japan. While nowhere near as popular as cats and dogs, kilifish are easy to maintain, and might even be allowed in apartments where stereotypical pets like cats and dogs that are liable to cause noise and damage are forbidden.

I’ve kept kilifish on the balcony of my apartment ever since I received some from my Aikido sensei’s widow after he passed away. He kept them on the balcony of his apartment too. I just didn’t know he had them as pets in the first place until then as he never mentioned them to me.

Kilifish will eat their own eggs and offspring, and I personally think they lack any form of intelligence that interests people who keep pets as companions. Keeping fish is like keeping plants if I had to describe the experience so far. I’d like for them to thrive and reproduce as them dying out would be a sign of failure and neglect.

Fortunately they’re resilient and all I need to do is move the eggs to a separate container and wait for them to emerge. While they’re young, they still have to be separated from the adults until they’re large enough to not be eaten as food while in the same space. At the same time I don’t want to keep the young as they mature in the same pool they’re born in for too long or else risk them eating other spawn that hatched weeks later than them.

There looks to be forty to fifty spawn so far, which might even surpass my current adult population. I think next year I’ll be more selective about how many eggs I move and allow the chance to hatch.

Thanks for reading!