How to Keep Ornamental Goldfish Well? A Detailed Guide to Keeping Techniques

Goldfish can be seen in many homes and companies, kept either in small fish tanks or in large landscape aquariums. The question of how to keep goldfish well is also of great concern to goldfish keepers, so let's talk about it below.

I. A Brief Introduction to Goldfish

1. Goldfish is actually a fish species that originated in China, and there are records of high officials and noble lords keeping goldfish since ancient times. Goldfish is in fact an ornamental fish evolved from the crucian carp, so it is also called the golden crucian carp. It has many varieties and prices vary from high to low, and the colors of goldfish are even more rich and varied, such as red, gold, orange, purple, blue, silver-white and so on.

2. With so many types of goldfish, their forms naturally differ greatly, including the flat-head, lionhead, goosehead and pompon-head types, but most of them have tumors growing on their heads. In addition, the eyeballs of goldfish are rather enlarged and protruding, and the fins are mostly large and spread out.

3. Besides its ornamental function, keeping goldfish also carries very good symbolic meaning. Placing goldfish in homes and companies signifies a house full of gold and jade and abundance year after year, and in feng shui it is also said that keeping fish is very helpful for attracting wealth.

II. How to Keep Goldfish Well?

If you want to keep goldfish well, you must first make sure you do not keep them to death, and then once you have mastered the keeping techniques, you need not fear failing to keep them well.

1. Whether goldfish can be kept well depends fairly importantly on selection. For example, if you have mastered the key points of how to keep goldfish, but the goldfish you pick out are weak, sickly and defective, it will be hard to keep them well. But if the goldfish you select are healthy and intact and you add keeping techniques on top of that, would you still worry that your goldfish are not kept well! So the following goldfish selection methods have been compiled for your reference:

(1) Choose goldfish with a plump, strong body and graceful yet powerful swimming posture;

(2) Choose goldfish that swim together with the school and are lively, because goldfish that swim alone apart from the group are mostly not very healthy;

(3) Choose goldfish with a well-proportioned head and tail and eyes of symmetrical size that are full of spirit; goldfish with one eye large and one small, or with an uneven or crooked tail, are not good;

(4) Choose goldfish with complete scales and good color. Incomplete scales mean either illness or being bullied, and such fish are hard to keep well when taken home; as for color selection, simply choose fish of the goldfish's own true color, which simply means that if this variety of goldfish is originally black, then you should not choose gray or black-gray ones.

(5) The last point is not to choose and buy goldfish that frequently float to the surface to breathe and spit, because such goldfish are especially intolerant of low oxygen and easily die after a few days of keeping.

2. For keeping goldfish you can choose a ceramic basin or a glass tank, and those with the means can use a fish tank equipped with a filter and an oxygen pump. In addition, try to choose a wide-mouthed container for holding them, so that the area of contact between the water surface and the air is large enough.

3. If conditions allow, it is best to place them somewhere that gets sunlight, so the goldfish will be kept better. Of course, in high summer temperatures you must pay attention to shading and cooling, to avoid sudden changes in water temperature affecting the goldfish.

4. The feed for goldfish can be bought at flower and bird markets, such as fish worms, cyclops, paramecia and tubifex, all of which are fine. Do not feed too much each time, because overfeeding can easily burst the goldfish.

5. When changing the water in the fish tank, be careful not to change the whole tank. If before changing the water you have fished out all the goldfish excrement and food residue in the tank, you only need to change one tenth of the water; if you cannot fish it out, change one third of the water. The new water must be water that has been left standing for one or two days, and you must keep the new water added close in temperature to the water in the tank, so that the goldfish can adapt well.

Finally, a reminder that after feeding you should promptly fish out the leftover food residue, so as not to affect the water quality in the fish tank. Basically, once you have mastered the above, you need not fear failing to keep them well.