Gary Rich wrote:
I picked up a nice little shusui (scaleless asagi) this spring at the
Young Koi Show in SoCal. He was only $18 at 2" with a nice color. He's
now ~6" and the blue upper section is sky blue or maybe cornflower blue
(in the Crayola color scale).

I did a quick images.google.com search for a good pic of one to link to,
but didn't really see one. They all had much less blue coloring than
this little guy has. Maybe the blue is hard to photograph or tends to
fade with time?

These sites have a couple of good shusui photographs; many pictures
looked washed out and I think that's why the pale blue doesn't show so
well. I also ran across a site that mentioned qualities for judging a
shusui koi (sorry, can't find it again now) and it said that the red and
dark blue should be separated by "pure white," which I think is the baby
blue in the younger koi.

http://www.thompsonaquaticgardens.com/hobbyist.htm
http://www.koiextreme.com/koisales/shusui.htm
http://www.asianarowana.com.my/koi/koi8.shtml
http://www.koi-schmid.de/spezial/shu...dy_shusui.html
http://www.auskoi.com/shusui_class_champion_.html

We have a small hi shusui: it has more red on its head and back, but has
the pale blue around the dorsal fin and the dark blue scales. He's "Baby
Blue" as that is the color we could see first when he was a 1/2 inch fry.
--
Zk