Exporting your Koi

Exporting Koi

As part of the service here at Koitrips, we do not stop at guiding you around the mountains where you can pick amazing Koi.

We will make sure the Koi are shipped to you in excellent condition, no matter where you are.

Koi bought from the last Koi buying trip to Japan are now in our own facility in the UK and are going through our very strict quarantine protocol. This will take around 4-6 weeks depending on the Koi.

They are brought into cool water, around 16C and are left there for around 1 week in a 0.5% concentration of salt. In this time we will add an acriflavine based treatment to eradicate some parasites and also to calm them down. After 10 days we then take mucous scrapes and determine what other parasites are there. Coming from Japan there are ALWAYS parasites on the Koi but are very easy to treat as long as you have prior experience. If you are getting Koi from us directly we will happily send full instructions on exact protocol. We will then kill any remaining parasites before we give them the very best treatment of all…Being left alone! We take the temperature to 18C and leave them. Of course we check water parameters and take more scrapes but when we kill the parasites and the beginning they usually do not re-appear.

At our facility we also have a small Quarantine tank where we take a cross section of Koi from the various breeders we buy from where we ‘heat ramp’ the Koi. They will heated to 24C for 10 days and then dropped instantly. We will cycle this procedure twice. We are already confident the Koi are in perfect condition but always do this as a precaution and to give our customers full confidence. We are inspected by Cefas on a regular basis due to us importing and exporting, it is very important to us.

After the 4-6 weeks, we will then start the paperwork to ship some of the Koi abroad. The last buying trip to Japan we had clients from South Africa, France, Malta, Denmark, Sweden and Spain. So now all their Koi must be shipped.

The Koi are conditioned properly for the trip and they will never be shipped until they are 100% perfect. 8 days before they are shipped the food will be stopped. The temperature will be dropped to around 12C so they are not as active as they would be at a higher temperature. The Koi will be loosely packed until they reach the various airports in the UK and then we will give them a final check and fill the bags full of oxygen and other additives we use in shipping.

The paperwork has been done in advance using our specialist agents here in the UK. Some of the countries do need work at their end too, such as making the airline know the client will be waiting to pick them up at the receiving country. Some countries need health certificates before the Koi are exported which we supply copies of, no problem. We will make it as easy as possible for our clients to drive to the airport and pick their new Koi up. Koi which have been fully quarantined and are in perfect condition. We will also send you a protocol of what to do over the first few days with your new Koi.

In many years we have never lost a Koi in shipping, we ship correctly. You can have full confidence in the service.