Bonzer Words!: Raising Goldfish
Quite serendipitously Betty Collins found herself a breeder of goldfish.
Betty writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please do visit www.bonzer.org.au
About four or five months ago, I inherited two large goldfish tanks from my grandchildren. That is, not exactly inherited: I snatched them from the pile of discarded and forgotten relics of my grandchildren's interests which my daughter had removed from her garage—destination St. Vinny's.* Soon they were set up on my patio (read back yard) with a few goldfish swimming around in them.
Nice. Then the weather grew warm, and one day I saw a couple of the aforementioned goldfish chasing madly round their home. Aha! I knew what they were up to, the shameless creatures. (The goldfish, that is, not the grandchildren.)
A dim memory stirred. The spawn must have some kind of nest—what, what?
All I could find were a few nylon bird's nest pot scourers. OK, I partially unravelled them, spread them out a bit, and tossed them into the aquaria. After another day or two I remembered that fish ate spawn. And so I hastily pressed into service three bright green square plastic basins about five inches deep, and with a little bucket, scooped out the 'bird's nests' with a jug and poured them into the basins. Another day or two, and one of the basins was suddenly alive with little creatures like tiny sand fleas. And then another. And then the third. There seemed to be hundreds, hundreds, uncountable: like a sky full of darting stars. Exciting!
I hastily consulted the Net to learn what to do about feeding. Everything I had done so far was textbook correct. Even the pot scourers. (How had I known? I suspect that it is one of the mysteries of senior memories that there is a lot more stored there than you know–if you can just flip the right file)
Now, food. Boiled egg, they said, in infinitesimal quantities. The babies didn't like it; and besides, it made the water smell unpleasant. They did not like a tiny tube of foul-smelling stuff bought from the pet shop for $10 either, and it smelt even worse. It seems they don't really need much extraneous food, anyway: they feed on tiny microbes in the water, and as some babies die, the others feed on the corpses–until some are big enough to eat conventional goldfish food. As they grow fewer in number, they become more visible to the naked eye, and more countable. I do confess to being saddened by the high attrition rate, but one has to admit that it is just as well. If survival in any way equalled the propagation rate, the world would very soon be submerged in goldfish.
Now three months later there are about thirty left. The biggest and fattest (presumably the most voracious cannibals) are about an inch long, and they range in size down to skinny little half-inchers.
I hope the smallest are now too big to be consumed by their siblings but I have given up grieving and will let you know if any survive to breed this summer.
* The colloquial name for St Vincent's, a group of charity shops in Australia.
© Betty Collins
