Not a simple fish, a golden fish.
To be continued…
Feeding goldfish is a very complicated issue, especially for beginners. Goldfish require less protein than tropical aquarium fish and more carbohydrates. The fact is that these fish are very voracious and forever hungry. Remember that it is better to underfeed the fish than to overfeed them. Adult fish receiving a balanced diet can easily tolerate even a two-week fast.
An abundance of food is especially dangerous at low water temperatures, when metabolic processes are slowed down. Goldfish should be fed once or twice a day in small portions so that everything is eaten in 5-10 minutes or less. Overfeeding is a very common problem when keeping these fish, and it can easily lead to various diseases, primarily related to the gastrointestinal tract.
They are omnivorous, therefore their diet must be varied. It includes live foods, plant foods, and specialized goldfish foods produced by a number of manufacturers. Dry food (both flakes and, especially, pellets) should preferably be soaked in water for a few minutes before feeding. Otherwise, there is a risk that food particles swelling after ingestion will trigger a digestive system disorder. Frozen food must be thawed to room temperature before feeding and fed immediately after thawing. Overfeeding with bloodworms must be especially avoided.
Various plant foods, such as lettuce, cucumber, dill, cabbage, nettle, etc., must also be added to the diet. All this is scalded, finely chopped, and served to the fish. Adult fish are able to eat, for example, lettuce leaves without scalding and sometimes even without fine chopping. Some aquarium plants — duckweed, *Riccia*, *Ceratophyllum* — are also good plant foods. *Ceratophyllum* is doubly useful because, being fast-growing, it intensively absorbs nitrogen from the water, thereby helping to reduce nitrate concentrations.
Purchasing fish is just as responsible an event as keeping them. Familiarize yourself with various diseases that can affect your favorite pet. Knowing the symptoms will help you recognize the disease faster and possibly save the lives of the aquarium inhabitants. If the aquarist has at least an elementary background knowledge, they are able to distinguish a knowingly sick fish if it has obvious signs of disease.
And it happens that even a specialist cannot see the disease at first glance! This directly applies to goldfish imported from Southeast Asia. In such fish, a dangerous disease may manifest a week or two after purchase, and this is not due to the fact that it is imported fish, but to the conditions in which it was kept upon arrival, including at the pet store. Relying on the honesty of the seller here is pointless — they may not even know what they are selling, especially since many current pet store sellers just need to sell something, and what they sell concerns them very little.
Quarantine today is one of the most important means of preventing fish diseases. Therefore, it should be carried out in a separate, specially designated container for a sufficiently long period (at least four weeks, and if the source of the fish causes the slightest doubt, much longer). During this time, if the fish is a carrier of any disease, it will most likely make itself known. And then everything depends on the type of disease, the condition of the fish, and the aquarist’s decision whether to treat it or humanely get rid of it (for example, if the fish is sick with tuberculosis or ichthyosporidiosis).
To quarantine fish, it is necessary to set up a special tank with water heating and aeration. It is best if it is a small aquarium (so that there are 35-50 liters of water per adult fish). Soil, plants, decorations, and the like seem unnecessary. The main goal of quarantine is to adapt the fish to the keeping conditions in the general aquarium and prevent the appearance and development of various dangerous diseases.
As you know, there are two main types of quarantine: passive and active. Passive quarantine involves the isolated maintenance of the fish in a quarantine tank without adding any medications. Active quarantine is a complex of therapeutic and prophylactic procedures aimed at therapeutic action against obvious or hidden pathogens by adding medications to the quarantine tank. In any case, quarantine should last at least a month.
Reproduction: When kept in good conditions in the second year of life, fish become sexually mature, but for breeding, it is better to use fish that have reached 2-3 years. It is usually very difficult to determine the sex of goldfish. With a lot of experience, you can notice that the front ray of the pectoral fins in the male has notches. Females are distinguished by a somewhat greater fullness. The manifestation of sexual differences intensifies during the spawning period.
In March-April, when daylight hours begin to noticeably lengthen, young males begin to chase females, staying near their ovipositor. By this sign, mature fish ready for spawning can be infallibly identified. A male ready for spawning has characteristic differences: a saw on the first ray of the front pair of pectoral fins in the form of a series of notches, and warts appear on the gill covers, usually the size of semolina grains. The female has a thick, egg-filled belly.
40-50 liter aquariums can serve as a spawning ground for short-bodied breeds, and 60-100 liter ones for long-bodied breeds. Two to three weeks before spawning, the breeders should be kept separately, preferably at a lower temperature. Spawning is stimulated by adding fresh water. Usually, 2-3 males are placed per female for spawning. A water level of 15-20 cm, strong aeration, and bright lighting in the spawning aquarium stimulate spawning. Temperature 20-26°C. Substrate: fine-leaved plants, synthetic fibers, etc. Productivity is 2-10 thousand strongly adhesive eggs.
After spawning, breeders begin to greedily eat the eggs, so either the fish are removed, or the substrate with adhered eggs is transferred to a pre-prepared aquarium. The incubation period lasts 3-4 days, and in another 2-5 days, the fry swim. A freshly hatched fry is very weak and helpless. It looks like a thread equipped with two eyes at one end and a gallbladder in the middle. They should be fed “infusoria” (“live dust”). The fry develop quickly, but unevenly. At one month of age, substandard fry should be culled. As the fry grow, they need to be sorted by size to prevent cannibalism.
The young of scaled varieties initially have the silvery-gray color of their ancestor, the crucian carp. This color changes to gold, white, and pure black at the age of 3-5 months. A certain part remains uncolored until old age. Scaled ones necessarily change their color, with white ones changing last.
Coloration, with rare exceptions, goes from darker colors to lighter ones: from black to red, from red to white. Picturesque motile red-black colorations are unstable and eventually turn red. Scaleless fry do not go through the silvery coloration period and begin to color into their final color as early as one and a half months of age. At 2.5 months, you can already get an idea of the final coloration, although the best calico colorations fully develop within 2-3 years. Short-bodied fish live up to 15 years, long-bodied up to 30 years.
Goldfish and koi carp in the pond.
Goldfish and koi carp look great not only in aquariums, but also in garden ponds, and they feel even better there. It is no coincidence that experienced breeders recommend releasing carp and goldfish for summer outdoor wandering to obtain the most attractive forms. From an aesthetic standpoint, having even a small body of water on a country plot can bring immense joy to both aquarists and gardeners.
Recently, plastic containers for country ponds have gained popularity. They are durable, lightweight, environmentally friendly, resistant to frost and ultraviolet rays. Ready-made ponds come in various shapes and depths. The ideal depth for a summer pond is 30-60 cm with a capacity of 350 liters or more. It is desirable that the pond has a water drainage device. It is also useful to provide an upper overflow so that in case of reservoir overflow (for example, during prolonged rain), losses among fish can be avoided.
The edges of the pond should be raised above the ground and disguised using both living elements (ferns, grasses, mosses, fast-growing groundcover plants) and non-living attributes: stones and bizarre driftwood as decorations. When setting up a pond, it is necessary to provide a canopy that will help avoid excessive insolation and water overheating. To a certain extent, this will also protect against the scourge of outdoor decorative ponds — water blooming and algal overgrowth of the walls.
Roughly per square meter of pond area (at a depth of 20-30 cm), you can stock 3-5 fish measuring 8-10 cm or a dozen fry 2-3 cm long. Moreover, in addition to goldfish and koi, livebearing toothcarps and large barbs can be kept in such artificial ponds in summer, and in southern zones with a milder climate — unpretentious cichlids and even characins. Fish love fresh water. If necessary, water is subjected to mechanical and biochemical filtration. Water in the warm season must be changed 1-2 times a month. Otherwise, the inhabitants of the pond will get sick and die, poisoned by metabolic products.
Shore decoration depends on your taste and the style in which the entire garden is designed. The main task is to hide the protruding edge so that the plastic of the form is not visible. This is achieved using plants, stones placed on the edge step, decorative tiles, or gravel. You can lay turf around the pond and arrange an alpine slide nearby.
When landscaping the pond, you can use a wide group of aquatic and coastal plants (water lilies), including unpretentious marsh plants of the temperate zone. Plants for the pond are chosen taking into account their biological characteristics. It is best to plant them in special baskets for aquatic plants and place them on terraces at the required depth. The baskets should be secured by laying small stones around them or sprinkling gravel.
Fish in an enclosed pond are constantly facing threats to their lives, ranging from crows to infectious diseases. In addition to birds, dragonfly larvae, diving beetles, water scorpions, backswimmers, and whirligig beetles pose a real threat to the fish community of your pond. They feed on fish eggs and sometimes fry. Blood-sucking leeches, carp lice, and copepods that parasitize on its body can weaken the health of the fish. Affected fish become restless and vulnerable to any kind of infection.
The appearance of pathogens and disease carriers in a garden pond (especially with high stocking density) leads to mass infection of fish and contamination of water, which, moving from one pond to another, spreads the infection. Therefore, in the event of an epidemic, as a rule, the infected fish are completely destroyed, and complete disinfection is carried out in the pond. Economically, this is very expensive. This means that in the fight against diseases, preventive measures — regular disinfection of the pond, inventory, and equipment — play a leading role, rather than therapeutic ones.
