Tales from the Tank #12

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish - How many Gold Fish are too Many Fish?

You can probably already figure where this is going. In my husbands' addiction to craigslist, he is finding all types of interesting items for sale, from puppies, RV's and yes of course...FISH!

But not just any fish.  These were Gold Fish. The person posting needed to find a home that would adopt her two Ryukin Goldfish.  She had a Black Moor that was picking on them.  So the discussion started "Should we adopt them? Could we adopt them? Would they fit in with our current fish family?"  Of course the discussion lasted as long as it took me to type the reply "We will take them if you still have them".

So last night, I met the young lady who was putting them up for adoption and brought them home. They are beautiful. One is a shiny gold with a large fantail and is very plump.  The other is the more colorful black, gold and white and looks a little off balance when swimming.

I introduced them to the tank and they started to swim around their new home checking things out.  It wasn't too much longer though, when the three current residents of the tank started to chase the large gold one around.  It was almost as if they were attacking it - saying "this is our tank-you stay away".

When ran out to get pizza and some groceries, and when we came back we went downstairs to check the fish.  The three resident fish, who we'll call Winkin, Blinkin and Nod, were chasing the heck out of the gold ryukin. So the super connoisseur of the Internet ran upstairs to Google goldfish.

Apparently the gender of goldfish is a bit difficult to determine.  It has to do with fin size (imagine that), at if the fish is plump or more slender when looking at them from the top of the tank (hum...).  Apparently we pretty much dropped the honey pot of all goldfish into the tank.  When you have multiple goldfish in the tank, the goldfish being chased is likely to be female and is omitting some type of pheromone that either attracts or repels the male of the species.

Realizing this is somewhat "normal" behaviour for fish (you would have thought we learned it with the mollies), I went upstairs to put my jammies on and Terry stayed to keep an eye on the fish.  About 10 pm he comes upstairs and says, "if those three goldfish kill her I'm gonna flush them all". "She better not be dead in the morning or I'm flushing those fish".

So I jumped up, and thank goodness we had left the 10 gallon tank in Matt's room.  I grabbed a 5 gallon bucked and started putting that tank back together.  Terry said, "What are you doing?" I replied "I don't want any fish to die so I'm gonna move them back". So we got the pump and the tank going, added the chemicals and then went downstairs to the tank.

Working together we successfully captured the two most aggressive goldfish and put them into solitary confinement - back in the 10 gallon tank they've been out of for two weeks.

So much for bigger digs....