Actually, lilly leaves are fairly transparentand the fish can see the food
on the leaves. A couple of years ago, one of my koi learnt to crusie on the
surface of the water up to a leaf with scattered food on it, ride the lilly
leaf and push on through until it got to the pellet!!! A couple of others
learnt to do this trick too. But you know what they say about a GF and its
memory ........ well in following years they have never done it since
sadly. It was great to watch.



"Ann in Houston" wrote in message
m...
"none of my koi go after my lilies ... but then I feed high quality koi
food
after Jo
Ann told me her koi stopped ripping up everything after she started
feeding
the high
quality stuff too.
the exception is... if a piece of that food ends up on top of a lily leaf
my
koi
breach to get that piece of food they can smell it right thru the leaf.
the other thing is I use river rock over the lily roots with pea gravel
between.
Ingrid"

Ingrid,
Thanks for the tip. The rock by itself doesn't do the trick. I've tried
that. It must be the combination of the two measures. What brand of food
do you use, and who can I order it from? I have two large bf koi that we
are not going to move out with the other koi, because we can't bear to
risk
injury to one of them, who is our pride - and because they would add a
significant number of fish inches to the new pond. The pond they are in
now
is really big, and we want to add plants to help with the algae problem
next
spring. We have repeatedly tried to shade the big pond, but nothing
effective looks nice right in the front of the house. So, we decided to
build the new one, just for koi, in a spot that would be easy to build a
roof over. If we could discourage those two from eating the lilies, it
would be really great, besides the obvious benefit to the fish of having
good quality food.