Fins

Description

Fins

Fins is a Father’s Day card featuring two koi carp swimming. Their fins are barely breaking the surface of the water. Overlaying the image is a text box with text ‘Happy Father’s Day’. The nice thing about fish is that they are not footballers or racing cars. Nor or they any of the supposedly male-oriented subjects. So a son or daughter can give it to a father knowing they are not buttonholing their parent into some role.

These koi carp are coloured red, orange, white, and black. Their sleek bodies slide through the water and a dorsal fin just breaks the surface of the water.

And the fin that breaks the water is a dorsal fin, it is a fin that sticks vertically upward on the back of most fish, whales, dolphins, and porpoises. The koi carp has one dorsal fin, as do most species, but some have two or even three dorsal fins.

The Fins Of A Koi Carp

To complete the description, koi carp have a caudal or tail fin, an anal fin, a ventral fin, and two pectoral fins as well as a dorsal fin. Koi use their caudal fin to push it through the water, especially when it wants to put on a turn of speed.  It uses its dorsal fin to stabilise it vertically while it is moving forward.  As the koi grows older, the leading ray of the dorsal fin becomes stiff and barb like. That way it does double duty of maintaining vertical balance and warding off predators.

The word koi comes from Japanese, and it means carp. So Koi Carp is really just a repetition of the word, like saying carp carp. And the selective breeding of carp in China led to the production of the goldfish. Goldfish did not simply evolve naturally. That is, koi were first bred for colour mutations in China more than a thousand years ago. And because koi are cold water fish, breeders have bred them selectively in lots of environments. And that led to smaller ‘version’s of koi that we know as goldfish.

SKU: C0325