The title made me want to punch you. +1
You were literally the one who suggested it! Go punch yourself!
thank u for the upboat
All hail the dumb wet puppers. +1. (tell Sharkie I love her btw)
she gave you a wet squishy koi noot
that either means she loves you too or that she's hungry and wants me to deposit food into her mouth
Sharkie is only magical in that she's got a self-contained black hole in her stomach.
The paladin are actually a school of silver carp in the Ohio River that are fighting against overfishing, pollution, and monsters. They're not magic at all, just sentient and full of Righteous Fury™. Some of them are actually magical, though! Carp of the Sky is able to open portals into other dimensions at will, amongst other things, and Skeletor's a necromancer. Note that not all of them are in the same dimension, so magic and the rules of magic are different across the board.
Very cute. +1
Also, calling it now- the squee when Zyn finds this will register on seismographs.
SQUEEEEEEEEEE
/zyn releases sonic marp
Well, now people know the context for that wizard carp discussion in critique chat.
I had a lot of fun reviewing this in chat and generally flailing around about magical koi and DID YOU KNOW BUTTERFLY KOI ARE A THING??? Specs told me about them! They are so beautiful and shiny and graceful and majestic and IF WE EVER CONQUER THE EARTH WE'RE PUTTING THAT ON OUR FLAG, MMMYEP.
In the meantime, I wouldn't mind having a T-shirt with a butterfly carp on it.
I digress. This is a fun piece. +1
SONIC MARP HAS BEEN ACHIEVED
Some butterfly koi can get hilariously long fins. One of the two original males in my pond looked more like a jellyfish than a koi sometimes. He was such a nerd though. You could always tell when it was breeding time because the day prior he just had to jump up and start taildancing. I never could figure out why he did that, I guess he was just really excited.
Maybe showing off? Doesn't make much of a difference in a small pond, but for wild carp or even carp in one of those huge botanical garden/park type ponds, wouldn't hurt to do a little extra attention-seeking.
The wild-type carp that exhibited the gene were a variant of C. carpio which were endemic to Indonesia. I think they went extinct due to the pet trade/habitat loss, but it's not really clear. Doesn't look like there was much research done on them, nor many pictures taken, because I can't find anything. The gene's a dominant gene, so it isn't as if the wild longfin carp were necessary to keep the gene in the population once it got there.
The gene in koi has been bred for exaggerated long fins, because people think they look pretty. I've never seen in-person (or heard of it) where the fins were so long that they actively hampered the koi; the male in question had fins that approached two feet long. Interestingly, the longfin gene also seems to affect barbel development; all butterfly koi I've seen also sport long whiskers.
I'm not sure where that specific koi had gotten such an exaggerated copy of the gene (and I'm pretty sure he only had one allele, not two!) from, because a) I don't know where the previous owners got him from, he came with the house and b) Sharkie and the other male were very clearly less-desirable koi, possibly from one of those "home and garden" stores instead of an actual breeder.
I was referring to the tail dancing, but still interesting. Could be that he was sort of a mutt, half butterfly and half another breed… also possible that he was their "fancy" fish- maybe the first one they got when they started the pond or something.
Oh, sorry! I misunderstood. Tail dancing might have helped with showing off (it certainly showed that he was a STRONG koi with GOOD MUSCLE CONTROL, even if it did look ridiculous when his fins were flopping everywhere), definitely. It comes with the price of showing off to birds of prey, too, but with all the tree cover over the pond there hasn't been a bird problem.
Well, koi "breeds" are all based on genetic expression. You can breed for specific genetic expression, but "mutts" are basically put into a breed based on what they look most like. It could be that they got him from a hobbyist, instead of a store or breeder. I know the genetics in my pond are interesting, with Buddy (who would have been a pedigreed show koi if he had made the cut) as the main breeding male and then near-wildtype Sharkie as the main breeding female.
Cute, sure. Though I don't know if we need two SH koi articles to gush about how cute they are. A neat choice of perspective and subject, but it's nowhere near as interesting as Dragons Gate -1.
I'm going to fill the SH tag with carp, just you watch me.
Although I'd like to point out that neither article is solely about koi. Koi just end up being the major focus because, well, I know them better than silver carp or grass carp or goldfish.
Magic carp talking about humans.
Edit: Well, okay. Some of them are just normal carp talking about humans.
Magikarp is actually コイキング (Koi King) in the Japanese language version.
Given your username, that's very fitting behavior.