NationStates Jolt Archive

i just bought a pair of goldfish, and i was wondering if youre supposed to put them in cold water or warm water

Just follow these easy steps for setting up a fish tank!!

1. Have your aquarium all set up. This should include a cheezy clay castle, gravel on the bottom (white looks the prettiest), and a fake plant. Real ones are fine but your goldfish will eat them and get big.

2. MAKE SURE THAT YOU HAVE SOMETHING THAT CYCLES THE OXYGEN OR THEY WILL DIE OF OXYGEN DEPLETION!!!! THIS STEP IS VITAL!! I recently had a fish die of this. (I'm assuming)

3. Make sure that your aquarium has been set up for 12-24 hours and that the water is room temperature

4. Assuming your fish are in bags, put the bags with the fish into the fish tank for 30 minutes to an hour so they can adjust to the change in water temperature.

5. Open the bags, and let your fish swim freely.

On a side note, your goldfish might cannabalize if you don't feed them for a while, and do not buy any fish that can fit in a gold fish's mouth or he will get consumed!

Enjoy!

i just bought a pair of goldfish, and i was wondering if youre supposed to put them in cold water or warm water
68 to 72F is the range I've been told. In all honesty though, those damn things can live in just about any type of water.

Clown fish are cooler. Don't deny it. You want the clown fish.


My older bother used to have a clown fish....twas big.....or maybe it's cuz I was 5 then....

thanks guys, i kinda feel bad for them though because the fish bowl isnt too big. i just wish there was a pond nearby

how do you know if it needs to be changed? right now one of them has bits of poop floating around

i just bought a pair of goldfish, and i was wondering if youre supposed to put them in cold water or warm water
Does it matter? Unless you are putting them in a coy pond, they will be dead in a couple of weeks.

how do you know if it needs to be changed? right now one of them has bits of poop floating around
Depends on the size of the tank, if it has a filter or not, and so on. Rule of tumb is when the water starts to turn cloudy or every two weeks.

The rule of thumb is one gallon of water per inch of fish. The first thing you need to do is to get a proper aquarium for them. You can find a cheap 2 gallon model complete with filter at most department stores for around 10 bucks. If you keep them in a goldfish bowl, they will likely be dead within 2 weeks. But a properly cared for goldfish can live over 20 years and grow to over a foot in length. I had mine for several years before I gave him away. During that time he grew from just under an inch to 10 inches.

Here is a good site on goldfish care.

http://www.goldfish-care.com/goldfish_care.php

Good luck.

i just bought a pair of goldfish, and i was wondering if youre supposed to put them in cold water or warm water
gold fish aren't tropical so they don't need a heater or even really a filter, but you won't have to clean the tank as often if you get a filter, an undergravel filter is cheap and will work fine for gold fish.

Make sure you treat the water before hand and cycle the filter for a while before you put the fish in, when you get them leave them floating in the bag in the tank for about 15 min so that the temp change doesn't shock them. Don't feed them for the first 2 days, in fact leave them alone or you will stress them.

The official rule is 1 gallon for every inch of fish, if your gold fish are bigger than this you may invest in a 5 gallon tank over a 2 gallon, there are a lot of great "gold fish kits" available now that will have everything you need to set up your tank except the gravel, plants, and food.

Make sure not to over feed them, check your ph, nitrates, nitrities, and amonnia every week. Good luck you can TG me if you have any more questions. ;)

how do you know if it needs to be changed? right now one of them has bits of poop floating around
only change it once every 2 weeks unless something happens (like you spill too much food in it) and then only do a 10% water change at a time, there are good bacteria in the tank (or there will be by the time you need to clean it) and if you get the tank too clean your fish will die. DO NOT change the filter the same week you change the water, it will mess up your balance of good bacteria.

BTW, be very careful about the size of the tank you get. Goldfish WILL grow to match their enviroment. I ended up with GodzillaFish for 6 years (not bad for a 10 cent feeder) when I put him into a 30 gallon tank.

We have a tiny pond in our backyard with goldfish, and they've survived through two new england winters so far, with the little pond freezing over every year. They're a few inches long now, too.


Goldfish are hearty little creatures, they can live to be 20 years old.

I have a dragon fish (violet goby) and he must be 4 or so! Then again, the mud goby is essentially an amphibian.

i just bought a pair of goldfish, and i was wondering if youre supposed to put them in cold water or warm water

Poor fucking fish.

Does it matter? Unless you are putting them in a coy pond, they will be dead in a couple of weeks.
Why is that? They're basically just carp, right?

BTW, be very careful about the size of the tank you get. Goldfish WILL grow to match their enviroment. I ended up with GodzillaFish for 6 years (not bad for a 10 cent feeder) when I put him into a 30 gallon tank.

hah! twelve years right here! forking over cash for the tank means next tank is the camden aquarium!

definitely get an oxygen thingie. they will die.

Oh, don't use water straight from the tap. It contains hypochlorite or chloramine as a sanitizer. It'll poison your fish. You can get dechlorinating chemicals at a pet shop, you can use water that's been standing for at least a couple of days to let the chlorine evaporate out (won't necessarily work for chloramines), and in a pinch you can spring for some bottled water.

One of my gold fish came to a rather unfortunate end lately. He was eating food that was too big for him in pretty cold water, and he couldnt digest it fast enough. So it started growing mold inside his stomach and came through to the outside. Dead the day after it started growing. It was a calico named Athens.
My current goldfish (calicos) are named
Cyprus
Belize
Ho Chi Minh (my little sister named it this because she looked at the map, per our custom of naming goldfish and picked out a city/country to name it. She didnt know Ho Chi Minh was actually a person, she just thought it was a funny sounding city.)

I've always thought it would be cool to get some of those goldfish with the big, bulbous eyes and the weird fins and release them into the local lake in hopes they'll get as big as Koi and fishermen will start catching them.

Don't over feed them!! Goldfish have a very short memory (like 5 seconds or something) and will eat themselves to death. But yea, they are tough little fish, we bought some feeders and they lasted about three years in our outdoor pond, we brought them in, during the winter (Canada can get cold).

My Fishies:

Freud
Jung
DSM

I've always thought it would be cool to get some of those goldfish with the big, bulbous eyes and the weird fins and release them into the local lake in hopes they'll get as big as Koi and fishermen will start catching them.

In some states, it is illegal to introduce non-native fish to public waters. Howver, I'm not sure of the fines. It might not be worth it.

Shqipes, yah so a Goldfish is a cold-water fish. So water that is room temperature from your tap will do. They dont like temperatures much above the high 70s.

Couple things, like others said make sure you get some de-chlorinator from the fish store so you can use tap water. If you cant get any in time, you can just set aside water in an open container for a couple days and the chlorine will have evaporated.

Try not to shock your fish by pouring in water that is much different in temperature than the water already in it, that can often kill a fish. They can tolerate much lower, icy temperatures but the temperature change must be gradual for them to adjust.

Since you have just a small fish bowl with no filtration, you will want to change like 90% of the water every day! for your fish to have good quality water because fish waste + no filtration and no water circulation = bad water very fast. The 10% per week thing is what you would need if you had an aquarium with filtration.

So like that other person suggested you should spend a bit more money and get a small aquarium kit, even that will make your fish live 50 times longer than it could in a bowl. Plus theres less upkeep with an aquarium since you dont have to clean it as much.

hey guys, thanks for all the help, but the fish died

:(

http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=466633 (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=466633)

it sucks though because i think it was my fault. when the little fish died, i changed all of the water for the big one. according to what you guys told me, that shcoks the fish's system

I've always thought it would be cool to get some of those goldfish with the big, bulbous eyes and the weird fins and release them into the local lake in hopes they'll get as big as Koi and fishermen will start catching them.

It almost certainly wouldn't work. Fancy goldfish like this would be almost helpless in the wild since they can't see well enough to capture wild fish for food and they can't swim fast enough to get away from bigger fish.

But I'm sure any big bass in the lake would appreciate the easy to catch meal.

hey guys, thanks for all the help, but the fish died

it sucks though because i think it was my fault. when the little fish died, i changed all of the water for the big one. according to what you guys told me, that shcoks the fish's system

Don't blame yourself. Fish die, animals die, people die all the
time, just like that. Why, you could wake up dead tomorrow.