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00:00Here we are at the 2024 Koi World Championships, where they pick the most beautiful koi in the world.
00:08And this particular year, Dr. Heidar Youssef has been given the honor of being able to become the first Shinkokai judge at the World Championships from the Middle East.
00:22So congratulations, Heidar. What can you say about your experience in Tokyo here in Japan?
00:28Well, thanks very much, Tony. I think for the UAE to be the first country from the Middle East to achieve this great achievement and present an international judge in the All Japan Koi Show, it's a fantastic achievement.
00:39And I'm certainly very privileged and honored to be that judge and to participate in this phenomenal event. Amazing fish.
00:46It was a really, really great experience. And thanks very much for your support in doing that.
00:51And to be honest, it's once in a lifetime experience. I've been enjoying the judging. The process was a little bit complicated, but I managed it well.
01:00And happy to have participated in selecting the grand champion and some of these beautiful fish that we see here today.
01:09I'm a doctor, a health care person, and my personal passion and hobby has been to collect Japanese koi fish.
01:18I'm a longstanding hobbyist. I've been keeping and collecting fish for a long time.
01:22And I got more passionately and more professionally into Japanese koi fish over the last few years.
01:28I was privileged to be the first person from the Middle East to win a major award in the All Japan Koi Show in 2018.
01:36And this year I've been selected to be the first international judge from the Middle East to judge in the All Japan Koi Show.
01:44Now, All Japan Koi Show is basically the world championship of koi beauty, where all of the top fish from all over the world basically compete in Japan for the grand champion, which is the most prestigious award in that space.
01:59Well, I've been into fish since I was very young. I started fish keeping since I was 10 years old.
02:14And I was fascinated by this world and I started to learn about it a lot more.
02:19And at that time, there was no Internet, there was no resources available.
02:23So I had to read university curriculum books from Amman University and Egypt University to get the science necessary for me to keep those fish successfully and to breed them successfully.
02:34My very first fish keeping experience was when I was 10 years old and I bought an aquarium and I put a lot of fish there.
02:40And in two weeks, all of those fish died. And I was starting to try and understand why did the fish die?
02:46What is the science behind it? What are the parameters of keeping these fish healthy?
02:51And what should I do to actually maintain them and sustain them?
02:55So I started to read about it and learn a bit about the filtration systems.
02:59How do you actually design a filtration system to keep your aquarium healthy?
03:04How much should you feed the fish?
03:06I started to learn about water parameters.
03:09Fish come from different parts of the world and they have different parameters.
03:13So fish that come from Amazon River, for example, they like a very soft water because Amazon River is fundamentally rainwater, which is extremely soft.
03:21Versus fish that come from Malawi Lakes in Africa, which live in very, very hard water.
03:26It's almost as hard as seawater because the rocks that are around these lakes are very hard and they produce a lot of calcium and the water hardness is very high.
03:36So in order to actually keep fish successfully, you need to try and mimic the conditions that they're used to in their original habitat.
03:45And that is a science in itself.
03:47So how to raise the pH or lower the pH, increase the KH or to simulate the breeding cycle.
03:52So a lot of fish breed in the rainy season.
03:55So you do a cold water, water change to give them the impression that it's now raining and there is cold water coming from the sky and then they go into breeding mood, basically.
04:04So a lot of these kind of facts I started to read about and learn in order to be able to keep fish successfully.
04:11Koi fish are your ultimate fish keeping prize because they are sort of considered like thoroughbred horses, a very high end collector item.
04:22And Japanese koi fish that make the mark and reach international competitions are actually extremely expensive and sometimes they can reach millions of dirhams in value.
04:33And they are very sort of highly prized possession and collectors from all over the world actually seek them.
04:41And the top breeders sometimes may only produce a few thousand fish in a season.
04:47And you have hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world try to get these fish.
04:51So their value constantly increases.
04:54And as the fish grow in size, the value of that fish multiplies significantly as well.
04:59So my personal collection is basically a mix of different fish.
05:04Obviously, one of the most common fish is what's called a Kohaku.
05:08And a Kohaku is a red and white fish.
05:11And when you are judging a red and white fish in competition, for example, you look at the distribution of the red color across the fish.
05:20You look at the body conformation of the fish.
05:24So that is called Kuchibeni.
05:28And Kuchibeni is like a lipstick.
05:30So that's a fish with a lipstick basically and that has a certain merit in evaluation.
05:35So for example, if you look at, let's wait for one of the red and white fish to come in.
05:41So that fish, if you can see, the body is a little bit thinner.
05:45So it's a medium quality fish in comparison with this one where the body is much more balanced and organized.
05:52This is a red, white, black fish that's called Showa.
05:55And you can see the three colors are distributed nicely across the body, which gives it a merit as well.
06:02Some of the single color fish, you look at the scalation and you look at the symmetry of the scalation.
06:07How symmetrical is the fish? How clean is it? It doesn't have any dots.
06:12So all of these are merits that basically are used in final competitions to value the fish.
06:18So that's a red and white fish, but it has a little black spot, for example, over there.
06:22And that black spot is a demerit that loses value because it's supposed to be a red and white fish.
06:28For example, even where you see the last spot before the tail, where that ends and how close that is to the tail.
06:36If it's too close to the tail, then that's a demerit.
06:39If it's too far from the tail, it's a demerit.
06:42So it has to be within like half a centimeter away from the tail for it to be regarded as high quality.
06:49And obviously Japanese koi fish are very friendly. They're like pets.
06:53You can pet them, play with them, you can feed them.
06:56They would come and eat from your hands.
07:05So obviously they don't have teeth, they don't bite, they can't bite.
07:08And they're very, very friendly with humans.
07:10In fact, they actually can recognize their owner because they recognize your footsteps.
07:16So when I come out of the door in the morning, they're all sitting here waiting for me
07:20because they recognize that the guy that feeds us is now coming.
07:23And they know the different footsteps of different people,
07:26and they know that these are the footsteps of the guy feeding us, essentially.
07:30And you hear a lot about goldfish memory being a very short memory, but actually koi fish memory is very good.
07:37They recognize patterns and people.
07:39So this fish is a male, and male fish are a little bit more feisty than female.
07:44Female are a lot more calm and a lot more friendly.
07:47But we'll still assess the fish, evaluate the fish.
07:50So we look at all the criteria, the face, the body, this is the shoulder.
07:56We look at the confirmation of the scales.
08:00So we look at it from down, we look at it from up.
08:03We assess it, we evaluate it.
08:05We look at the confirmation of the fins, all of the structures.
08:10So that's how we normally assess a fish.
08:12And then there's a very, very unique Japanese way of handling fish.
08:16So Japanese always handle fish by hand.
08:18So essentially, you take the fish like that, and then that's how you move the fish.
08:25So to me, on a personal level, especially given my busy job in health care,
08:30fish keeping has given me a lot of peaceful time.
08:33And this is actually a very peaceful place for the whole family to gather around,
08:37have breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
08:39And it allows us to disconnect from sort of the normal world
08:44and go into a much more peaceful place.
08:47And, you know, I've been trying to support people here
08:51to understand a bit more about fish keeping and koi fish.
08:54And I'm always happy to help people to get into that,
08:56because there's a lot of science that you need to do
08:59in order to actually create an environment like that and keep the water clean.
09:03I think some of the most important tips are always get a good filtration system,
09:07understand what you want to achieve out of it,
09:10and then make sure that you're actually building a deep pond,
09:16because koi fish need that depth, and deeper water can maintain its temperature.
09:21And especially in our hot weather, temperature maintenance is very important
09:25because these fish come from a cold sort of weather.
09:28And we need to try and manage the temperature as much as possible.