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fourteen--steps · 6 years

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On big goldfish, and listening to each other

I apologize if the tone of this post is maybe a little more snippy than my usual ones. I’m usually very thoughtful with my words but I’ve had an incredibly rough physical and emotional week and I’m running low on spoons to devote to thinking things through properly. My frustration’s gonna bleed through here but I don’t want anyone to take it personal cause it’s really more me than you.

That said.

Remember that whole trend a while ago of “don’t give advice on animals you haven’t kept or deeply researched?” What ever happened to that? What ever happened to respecting the expertise and hearing out the opinions of people who actually have it in that field vs demanding you’re right because you’ve read some care sheets and seen some photos of worst case scenarios?

My whole life and world has been immersed in goldfish for the last several years. Keeping multiple breeds of both single tail and fancy, reading, researching, joining everything from casual hobbyist groups to those of serious breeders and highly respected names. I’ve moderated, built, and eventually owned my own care forum. I’ve spent hours reading vet manuals and scientific articles, as well as conducting necropsies on every animal I lose to better understand their inner workings and what’s gone wrong. I had the wonderful experience last summer of raising a small batch of someone else’s fry. I’ve experimented with all different kinds of food and filtration and maintenance and decor and enrichment.

I don’t know everything, nobody can. I’m not perfect, nobody is. But I can say with confidence I know a lot about the care and keeping of goldfish overall, and that my information is overall very solid and thought out.

So when someone comes in my inbox and asks my opinion on something goldfish related, my answer comes with all that experience and thought behind it. I often include caveats in my answers when I’m not 100% sure, or if I believe there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. I’m not so bigheaded as to believe that my way is absolutely always right and will work for every situation and every fish. But I answer in earnest and with confidence and reasoning.

But then my posts get immediately doused with comments from people who to the best of my knowledge have little to no experience with the species. The ones who do have experience tend to be polite in their responses, if not a bit misguided, although even then their knowledge tends to bottom out at keeping some orandas in a 40B or having tended a garden pond. Often the other comments are far more cursory and involve varying amounts of dismissal of my opinion entirely, insults, condescension, and most frustratingly, wild misinformation (much of which I’ve only heard echoed back and forth within the microcosm of tumblr, and never from a reputable outside source)

Like I’ve read a fair amount about bettas now both on here and elsewhere just cause they’re such popular fish and I’m a nerd and I’m curious. But I’ve never kept one, and I’m not an expert, and I’d never go be snappy on the advice post of someone who I know has a lot more practical and academic knowledge with them than I do? At the very least I could politely ask a question or voice a dissenting opinion with some of my reasoning, possibly acknowledging the deficits in my experience, but diving straight in with the vitriol just baffles me.

It’s come to my attention people are vagueing about me now and that’s just? So fucking childish and unnecessary. I’m also being accused of having stunted fish based on, among other things, the old eye proportion criteria, but btw that image of the ranchu that circulates as an example? Is heavily photoshopped and not a reliable catchall method to determine stunting.

For those who didn’t believe Zoom is as big as I said, I took this picture today. He’s not the most personable of my fish so he wouldn’t let me get him against a measuring tape but I measured my hand like that at about 4 inches, then pasted those identical bars on him (swear the blue bar is the same I just recolored so it’d stand out, not sure why it looks a little longer than the red). He’s just under 8 inches, nose to peduncle. Maybe even a tad longer cause he always curls a little when I flip him on his side (also why his side looks a little sunken here, he was getting ready to snap back and splash me in the face :P). When measuring goldfish you don’t include fins, by standard. If you wanna tack on the extra inch or so of tail go ahead and call him 9″

I also weighed him, he’s 109 grams which is a tad less than I’d like but I’ve been having issues with one fish in the tank needing a specialized diet so they’ve all been getting a little less protein than usual lately. The fish with the diet issue is probably going to be going back to @finefeatheredfish soon and I can pick up with weekly Worm Nights as usual again. His body condition is still good though rounded from above without being bloated, muscular rather than fatty, with a nice smooth taper head to tail and a bit of a belly. He’s not a very tall fish, but that’s more cause he’s a badly bred feeder fish who doesn’t fit the perfect common genetic standard than anything. Height isn’t about health, that’s a genetic characteristic that some fish just won’t achieve. In fact many tall “humpy” commons are not actually properly tall, but have large fat deposits along the tops of their bodies particularly built up behind the head which are an indicator of poor diet and overfeeding.

In fact if you want, here’s the US hibuna show standard! Take a look!

What about the eye thing? It’s huge compared to his head right? Well here’s a shubunkin posted by Gary Hater, currently one of the most well respected breeders in the US hobby, both for his fish quality and welfare standards. Who incidentally keeps most of his in aquariums and states that they normally reach 6-8″ indoors. This fish was from his “giants” tank, one of which he said was roughly 10 inches. This one in the video looked a little smaller than aforementioned Big Boy so I figure it’s around 8″ or so, like Zoom. and hey, look at that big googly eye! Almost like eye size can vary naturally in healthy goldfish and isn’t necessarily a sign of stunting without other important factors that are often much more subtle and far less textbook!

The last think I want to bring up, is that this whole “goldfish are ALL large” and by extension “NEED to be large” to be “right” worries me for another reason. I’m concerned there’s a mounting pressure that goldfish should be reaching these enormous sizes that they aren’t meant to, in far too short of a time. Many of the fish that do reach these sizes in captivity, yes even the ones in ponds, reach them due to powerfeeding. Intentional or not, these fish are put on high protein, high filler, sometimes high fat diets, and often fed a lot of it. Outdoor fish also gorge themselves on algae, insects, worms, snails, aquatic plants, sometimes other small fish, anything they can get their greedy little mitts on. Then their owner will dump in a large cup of cheap high protein pond conditioning food and they scarf that down too.

For aquarium fish, a nervous newbie keeper may see their young fish isn’t growing to the size they believe it’s supposed to and get a bigger tank, start feeding extra bloodworms, more meaty pellets, maybe turn the heater up a degree or two to boost their metabolism. They balance it out with lots of veggies so they think it’s okay, they just want their fish to be healthy and catch up to where it’s “supposed” to be! This leads to rapid and impressive growth, yes, but it comes with dangerous and potentially deadly consequences.

Some of you may remember Queenie. She was the largest goldfish I’ve ever personally encountered, 10-11 inches and fat fat with it. Her original owner surrendered her to our LFS and @finefeatheredfish immediately bought her with the plan that she’d move into my 150 when it was set up. She was healthy at the time, some kind of long bodied fancy mix and drop dead gorgeous, though she needed to drop some weight for sure. Too young to be that massive and visibly overweight. She was unquestionably a powerfed pond fish.

Cw for euthanasia mention, pet death, graphic descriptions, next 3 paragraphs

But about a month into her QT she began getting sick, infection-like symptoms but antibiotics didn’t do anything. We worked on her another month, did our best to save her. We probably should have euthanized her earlier in hindsight but we wanted so bad to get her through and give her a happy home. She was just so amazing you know? I took her for the last week of her life to try some last ditch treatment, she died about 3 days after this photo was taken.

I did a necropsy on her afterwards. Her vital organs were layered in fat. There was so much of it around her swim bladder that I thought it was another organ at first and got confused. I’m shocked it was still functional. Her liver was unidentifiable mush, suggesting chronic disease, and her gallbladder had simply exploded and spilled bile all over the surrounding tissue. Her body cavity was full of blood and fluid. The cause of death appeared to be the rupture of her gallbladder or liver and the tearing of some important vessel in that area, she bled out internally.

The chronic liver and gallbladder disease were entirely untreatable for home aquarists. What we thought was infectious dropsy was full on liver failure, she couldn’t balance the fluid and electrolytes in her body anymore which caused the swelling. Likely even if we had taken her to the vet there would have been little they could do. You can’t really remove a fish’s inflamed gallbladder, or transplant in a new liver to replace a failing one. Those conditions are linked to obesity in many species, and I have no doubt that Queen’s diet and obesity were the cause of the chronic conditions that lead to her slow death.

She was powerfed because someone wanted a large, impressive fish, and it killed her. She deserved so much better than that.

CW over

Powerfeeding and its results are not always that extreme, and I can go into more on the other risks and issues if anyone is interested, but this is long enough already. I wanted to include Queenie as a cautionary tale, and because I’m still so sad she never got to meet the rest of my little school. She was such a sweetheart.

I have a genuine concern with this normalization of 12-14″+ fish as average, that people are going to start pushing their pets to meet that. Most goldfish are not genetically capable of that growth. I’d go so far as to say most goldfish should not reach that size, at least not in any appreciably quick period of time.

Feed your fish well. Keep their water clean. Give them room to swim. They will grow on their own time, to their own size.

And lastly. I’m open to talking about this stuff, really. I love to learn new things and hear new sides. Just please, be friendly and mature and let’s have a real conversation? We can disagree politely. It doesn’t have to be black and white, mortal enemies, I know fishblr’s environment these days isn’t very conducive to that, and that’s part of why I’d left a few weeks ago. But I’m trying to give it another chance cause this community used to be really welcoming and wonderful. I’d really love for us to be able to step away from all this polarizing distrust and be open and considerate again.

My responses may be spotty because of the terrible week I mentioned at the beginning of this post but I’ll try and check back.

#I think I kept this mostly together and said most of what I want to say #goldfish #fishblr #long post #fishies #zoom #queenie #pet death mention

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