Posts Tagged ‘goldfish breeding’

The Spawning of a New Era: One Year Later

April 2, 2012

Many of you have been following the story since my goldfish unexpectedly hatched a few hundred fry almost exactly a year ago. Here’s a visual finale of sorts.

I didn’t know it at the time, but on the day our goldfish fry hatched, my husband made a video. I didn’t know he was filming while I was on the phone to a singularly unhelpful aquarium store, whose staffer intimated that he might be willing to give me advice if I came into his store, but wasn’t interested in telling me anything over the phone.

Here, for the first time, are the fry at just a few hours old, while I, a concerned and ignorant fish mother, am antagonized by an unsympathetic world.

Once I assembled the right equipment, for the first month or so, my main problem was that parents kept spawning. If you ever wondered what goldfish eggs look like, here you go. You can actually see the tiny fish curled up inside. At that point they’re mostly eyeballs and a spine.

At one day old, goldfish fry mostly cling to the side of the tank. They look nothing like fish.

But they quickly left their infancy behind:

At this point I was reading a bunch of fish care books that said I should “cull” 99% of the fry. So I was pretty stressed out, given my reluctance to kill the babies (the books didn’t say how I should do it) and my simultaneous knowledge that I would NEVER be able to find that many homes for goldfish.

The illusion that the fish were my children was reinforced by products like the net breeder, which was basically an underwater playpen, that my husband and I had to assemble.

I blinked and the fish were one month old.

Probably not the most humane photo opp, I realize now.

In no time at all, it had been two months since they hatched.

Somebody gave me this casserole dish for my wedding and this is how I used it. The fry had to go somewhere while I cleaned the tank.

The fry began to enjoy what I called egg bombs, which was a piece of hard-boiled egg yolk wrapped in cheesecloth and dunked in the tank.

At about three months, the fry discovered the joy of peas, which I carefully shelled and squashed for them.

At this point, summer vacation intervened, and rather than trust anyone else with my babies, I packed their tank and they rode in a bucket with me to the Jersey shore for a week. I should’ve taken some pictures.

I took more pictures when they were about five months old.

In case you're wondering, this is how much fish food I have.

Here is Augustus McCrae, (front) the first fish to have a name, always the biggest of the bunch.

Gus continued to grow.

Gus's companion, Woodrow Call.

Lorena Wood.

Nemo.

Unfortunately (or fortunately for my friends who were already bothered enough with offers of goldfish), Nemo was among many fry who bit the gravel. Like many other batches of animals born by the hundreds, not every goldfish fry that hatches will make it.

At eight months, seven of the largest were ready to go their new home. I put them in a jar for the ride.

My fry meet their new friends in the tank at Abington's Tien Thai Pho restaurant.

Meanwhile, back at home, the remaining survivors, who have gone from the playpen in the big tank to several months in their own two-gallon tank, go back into their parents’ tank.

Yes, someone is always pooping.

Bling (one of two possible fathers) and Augustus.

One month later, my childhood art teacher, still a friend today, adopts six of the fry.

The promises of a few other friends to adopt turn out flakier than fish food, but it’s ok. Goldfish are quite a responsibility, I’ve learned. I’ve had my oldest ones for about eight years and they have moved with me no less than eight times.  Cleaning a 40-gallon tank is no picnic, their equipment and materials are expensive, and every time I go out of town I have to set up these irritating battery-powered feeders.

The one-year-old Woodrow Call settles into his new digs. Note that the fish behind him is actually about six years old.

And then, Mom decides that she wants a few – Gus and Call, in particular. So, for her 52nd birthday (and Gus and Call’s first), I bring them in a bucket. By the time Gus and Call arrive at their new tank, they are extremely well-traveled goldfish, having visited four states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland.

Mom already has four goldfish known as The Wedding Fish. When I got married five years ago, she decided that goldfish would make a charming centerpiece for the tables. Four of them survived the reception and the day after the wedding, I bought a tank for them. They’ve lived at my parents’ house ever since.

A furry big brother.

So there you have it. Seven fry are left. A few are still available for adoption if you’re serious about fish. A year after they hatched, I sometimes still stop to reflect on the bizarre fact that one night last year, I went to bed with three fish and woke up with three hundred.

Here’s a video from this week, featuring both the original culprits and their remaining progeny in some excellent pellet-gulping action.

For those who haven’t been in on it from the beginning and want the whole story, visit The Goldfish Fry Saga category and scroll to the bottom for the first post.

 

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Posted in Animals, The Goldfish Fry Saga | 7 Comments »

An Embarrassment of Fishes: The Thrill of Peas.

June 28, 2011

This post is one in an ongoing series about my goldfish fry, hatched in March/April 2011. 

Here I was, thinking that I’d better not go on boring everyone with tales of my fish. But my mother tells me that her co-workers are asking her how my fish are doing, for lack of news on the blog. And they’re not the only ones asking.

My mom’s a busy woman. So am I, for that matter. We could be discussing any career leads you might have for me, or where to go for lunch, instead of the fish.  So it’s time for an update.

The view from above.

Though the first hatchlings are nearing three months old, my mother met her “great-grand fish” for the first time yesterday. Living in a different state and working 70-hour weeks are no excuse for not visiting the fry.

After deep worries about a concerted die-off (combined with guilty relief that I would need  fewer adoptive parents), the casualties have dropped considerably. From tiny snips of thread  with eyes, the oldest fry have blossomed with fins, tails, gills, and just in the last week  or two,  scales with an iridescent glint. If I had to make a guess as to how many have survived, I’d put it around 50 (numbers were never my strong point, and they don’t exactly  line up to be counted). As tails come in, the babies’ mixed heritage is clear: some sport their  fathers’ fancy double fantail, and some have their comet goldfish mother’s long, sleek, single  tail.

2-month-old fantail on the left, three-month old comet on the right.

(Prospective owners: feel free to start thinking now about which variety you’d prefer. The fantail fathers have prettier coloring, but no-one beats the comet mother for sheer size, orangeness, appetite, grace, speed and splashes.)

The fry remain in the two-gallon kitchen tank, but at the current rate of growth, I’ll need a bigger one soon. Maybe even two. God knows where they will go.

Tragedy struck today when I did a partial water change in the small tank. After weeks of no filter-related casualties, six of the largest fry must have been sucked into the filter in the last day or two. When I opened the filter to clean it today, three of the victims were floating. The others were hastily released back into the general population, but I felt a crushing remorse that three fish had made it so far only to perish in the filter. One of them had an unusually shaped tail – over the last week or two I had been contemplating giving him a name – quite a step, for a girl with so many fish.

I fit cheesecloth over the filter intake tube and apologized profusely to the survivors.

In the large tank, things settled down a lot with the start of summer. Princess pined for several weeks behind the divider, hardly taking her eyes off the boys to eat. But a few weeks ago I risked a reunion. Nobody seemed to have the faintest memory of the activities that led to such a surfeit of fish.

The only real problem I’ve had recently with the big fish tank happened during one of this month’s partial water changes. I often put movies on while I clean the tank. While I loaded one into the DVD player, the siphon I use to clean the gravel flooded its bucket. Only after everything was under control did I notice that the DVD remote was in my hand, soaking wet.

The remote lost all function. Later, it was able to turn the DVD player on and off. Finally, as if it just needed time to recuperate, it returned to full working order (I kept hoping and checking, because I didn’t want to admit that I had ruined the DVD remote without really being sure of how I did it, other than it had something to do with the fish tank).

I think the fry have outgrown the First Bites fish food. Like their parents (and animals everywhere), they want to tear ravenously at something delicious.  Nibbling the algae on the plant at every moment they are not being fed doesn’t cut it. So I skinned a pea, squashed it slightly, and dropped it in. Mad with vegetable lust, the fry whipped their tiny bodies back and forth, dragging the pea across the floor of the tank with their mouths.

PEA!!!!

And so, every few days, I stand in my kitchen, exclaiming, one might think, to no-one: “Who wants some peas?!”

Two months ago.

Last month.

This month.

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Posted in Animals, The Goldfish Fry Saga | 3 Comments »

An Embarrassment of Fishes: Moving Day

May 26, 2011

“Be good,” I’ve begun saying as I leave the apartment. It seems like I’m talking to myself. But I’m saying it to the fish.

When I think about it, I’m not sure what would constitute good behavior on their part. For the adults, not making more fry while I’m gone? (After several days of the tank divider I took pity on them and they were reunited. I went to the basement to do the laundry and when I came back up they were spawning. I took no egg-saving measures and nobody hatched. Divider re-installed.) Good behavior on the part of the fry could be to not die of unknown causes before I get home.

Because part of me is sorry to report that numbers have thinned somewhat of late. I say part of me because my worries about fry demise are balanced by a selfish relief at having fewer fish to find homes for.

At about seven weeks old, the first batch of fry began to experience a few losses per day. The tiny transparent bodies came to rest on the bottom of the crib. I’ve been fretting about it in the theater, on the train, and in bed. Am I proving a derelict fish parent after all? My ignorance had allowed the hatching in the first place. Now was my lack of know-how proving fatal?

I decided it was time to step up my game.

Powdered foods are all right, the experts say. But nothing is better for the fry than freshly hatched brine shrimp. The problem is the freshly hatched part. After fruitless visits to PetSmart and Petco (where friendly employees’ knowledge, somehow, is always limited to what is printed on the back of the package I am considering), my husband and I took a thirty minute drive to a specialty aquarium store to spend $12.99 on a plastic Shrimpery.

  “San Francisco Bay Brand”, the box said. Gourmet seafood, but not for       us. Three plastic packets of Sally’s Hatch Mix were included.

Doubts were already filtering in on the ethics of nurturing infant shrimp  only to feed them to infant fish. As I stirred the eggs into the Shrimpery and put it in a warm place, I tried to see it as plugging in the crock pot.

It would be at least twenty-four hours before the shrimp emerged, and they weren’t the only things I needed to cultivate. An aquarium store employee had suggested that my fry could be suffering from the ammonia from the large tank, which is not dangerous to the adult fish at low levels, but can stunt the tiny ones. It was time for them to get their own place.

The two-gallon tank is seeing a lot of service this year. First it was the hospital, then the nunnery, and now it’s the dorm. But you can’t just pour fish into a fresh tank (take note, potential adoptive parents). Every thriving fish-tank has a helpful bacteria population which alleviates the toxic by-products of life in the tank. A new fish-tank must be colonized by these bacteria before the fish arrive. This is one reason many people think that goldfish have a lifespan of roughly two days, once purchased. Fortunately I had a head-start with the large tank, and I transferred a plastic plant, some gravel and a filter element to the small tank, and let the tank run for about 30 hours.

If you're the person who gave us this casserole dish as a wedding present, I hope you're not too miffed to see how I'm using it. No receptacle is safe anymore at our house.

Then the kids bade goodbye to the crib and moved into the dorm.  They explored their spacious new surroundings in a businesslike manner. My husband noticed his new surroundings as well, namely the fish-tank on the kitchen counter between the cooking utensils and the sugar jar, but gallantly kept his peace.

Meanwhile, the shrimp were hatching. They swam up into the Shrimpery’s plastic top, pulsing orange-brown specks surging toward the light. I consulted a website on brine shrimp raising, and learned that it was even more complicated than I thought, involving worries over relative water salinity and the apparently minute window for the shrimp’s optimum nutritional value to the fish.

Don't go into the light!

I poured the shrimp in with the fry and the feast commenced.

As I hung over the little tank past midnight, I fancied that I had as many worries as parents leaving their child to undergrad orientation. What if the babies got sucked into the filter? What if they were frightened in the relative ocean of two gallons, after the confines of the crib? What if they got hungry?

At least, I told myself, they had a ready snack. The plant has a healthy coating of algae, and, like a dining-hall salad bar, it’s no shrimp cocktail, but it can be grudgingly nibbled at odd hours.

The next day, the risk of the filter still nagged at me, and just to check, I momentarily removed the filter matrix. Four or five fry of various sizes immediately shot out of the filter spout like infants out of a water-slide. Oppressed by guilt, I fixed a cheese-cloth square over the intake pipe with a rubber band.

Then I fed them all their favorite lunch, wrapping a fragment of hard-boiled egg-yolk in another bit of cheesecloth. This becomes an underwater egg-bomb buffet. Through their transparent skins, the fry’s little stomachs began to bulge yellow.

Meanwhile, the adults are sulking too much about their ongoing separation to notice their empty nest. I leaned over the large tank this afternoon, to reaffix the world map that decorates the wall behind it. Suddenly a large splash drenched my face. Princess darted back to the bottom of the tank as I wiped my glasses. I swear she was waiting for my face to get close enough. Definitely not good behavior.

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An Embarrassment of Fishes

May 9, 2011

The newest Mabaso fish: note well-grown month-old fry and tiny day-old fry, clinging to the sides.

This time around, at least, I have some experience.  As I eyed the latest round of goldfish eggs stuck to the crib holding their month-old (and two-week old) brethren, I weighed my choices. It was too late for preventive measures. I had to decide if I would leave this round to the mercy of their 7-inch parents in their 40-gallon world.

I got out the mixing bowl.

It was a tricky operation, but I dumped the existing fry into the bowl and removed their impending siblings from the outside to the inside of the crib using a baby-food spoon and a cheese knife. I scanned the rest of the tank, but could not see any more eggs. I replaced the crib and all its denizens.

I waited. In the meantime, I also worried about poor Princess, still knocking herself against the filter in vain.

It didn’t take more than another day. The new fry began to emerge. Every egg in the crib hatched. But to my deeper chagrin, dozens of fry had obviously escaped my earlier inspection. What could I do but go after them with the glass measuring cup that was dedicated to the fish tank years ago? (We have an identical measuring cup in the kitchen cupboard and my husband worries that one day, I’ll mix them up.)

By now, I am an expert at the Ambush and Scoop. With most fry clinging to the tank’s sides relatively close to the surface, one can quickly and gently plunge the cup into the water behind them, and the fry are sucked harmlessly in. Then I pour them into the crib. (Whether or not Serious Goldfish Breeders have ever employed this technique does not interest me.)

Instead of working on the essays I wanted to finish, doing the laundry, or watching my Netflix DVD, I spent hours scooping fry. Then I sighed in resignation, unplugged the power cord, and rescued all the babies that had been sucked into the filter.

Seeing that the population of the crib has almost doubled, the problem of Princess came into even sharper focus.  When the first batch was hatched I said I can’t handle this ever again, and now that I’m chasing the third, I’d like to say that I really can’t handle this ever again.  Princess hates the nunnery, but I’m certainly not risking a co-ed tank.

I went back to the pet store and bought some bits of mesh, plastic and wire that assemble into a “Tank Divider.” This costs $14.99. There are many fish you can buy for this price, but at this time it is necessary for me to spend fifteen dollars to NOT have any more fish.

I thought Princess would be happier if she had more space and was in her accustomed environment. But she is like those sad little lizards at PetSmart who try endlessly to climb the glass fronts of their terrariums. When she is not looking high and low for a weakness at the top, bottom or sides of the divider, she is resting with her lips to the fence.

Sometimes she noses the crib, but no-one in there gives her any comfort. Her erstwhile suitors sometimes visit her on their side of the wall as well as they can. Wherefore art thou egg bearers?

“She’s going to go Free Willy on that thing,” was my husband’s opinion on the Tank Divider. I am just irritated that now I am responsible for three separate food disbursements in a single tank.

Those who know me personally have begun saying “How are the fish?” instead of “How are you?” I tried to sell the world premiere baby photo at the top of this post to US Weekly or People for ten million dollars, but they didn’t want it. To the readers who are enjoying this saga: I will continue to write about my goldfish adventures on one condition. No more caviar jokes.

There's no such thing as the fun side when you can't hang out with the boys.

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Posted in Animals, The Goldfish Fry Saga | 4 Comments »

The Spawning of a New Era

April 5, 2011

My friends’ kids make their online debut in an ultrasound at three or four months. Once the child is born, parents usually go on to be wholly replaced by their offspring, with a profile picture featuring the child and status updates entirely composed of their child’s absurd, cheeky statements.

I never understood it.

But then I woke up on Thursday morning and learned how radically everything can change.

I fed my goldfish breakfast. Fondly I watched their usual frenzy over the pellets. But then I noticed something strange against the glass. There was something else in the aquarium. About five millimeters long, they looked like miniscule eyeballs attached to a thread-thin spine.

I had to Google Image “newborn goldfish” before I believed it.

Pieces of the puzzle began to fit. If you look at the header of my blog, you’ll see how companionable my fish usually are. But a few days ago, Werner and Bling had chased Princess in and out of the large plant for hours.  I just thought it was just a little school bullying, but “courtship among goldfish often consists of the male shoving the female against plants while he shimmies from side to side,” says The Essential Goldfish.

Costing $0.13, Princess had joined the tank a few years ago, and preferred to hide inside the miniature Parthenon before rapidly becoming the biggest, fastest fish in the tank. “Goldfish do not form pair-bonds,” Goldfish: A Complete Pet Owner’s Manual says. “They are promiscuous breeders. Any male will breed with any female.” Princess doesn’t need to know.

“Babe, look!” I said, pulling my husband to the fish tank.

“What?”

“You have to see what happened.”

“I have never seen anything like this,” he said. “Whoa.”

There is a peculiar, humbling wonder in going to bed with three fish and waking up with at least a hundred. It was no less than a true miracle. The world needed to know. I announced the births on Facebook and texted my mother.

Then my husband and I began to sense the challenges of parenting. The morning became fraught with anxiety. Thank God my meeting had already been canceled.

“We have to get them out of there,” my husband urged. “What are they going to eat? Are they starving in there?”

“Well I know the big fish will eat them if we don’t get them out. But how do we scoop them? Where do we put them? What do we feed them?”

I unplugged the filter and removed the three big fish to a bucket. Then I did what all new parents should probably do. I got on the phone for some help. Not that new parents call pet stores. But I’m sure the fundamental principles are the same.

At PetSmart, I had hoped to find someone who could relate to our excitement – and predicament.

“No, you’re the first customer I’ve ever seen who’s had goldfish hatch at home,” the woman said.

We purchased what we would need to ensure the babies’ survival over the next few days, including the apparent Gerber of the aquarium world, a tiny bag of food called “First Bites”.

At home, we opened the “net breeder” we had purchased and realized it was just the world’s smallest playpen – although, contrary to human playpens, this one would go underwater.

We took pictures of the new arrivals and posted them on Facebook. The fry don’t resemble their large, shiny, golden-white parents any more than first ultrasounds resemble a human, so I knew how interested everyone would be.

More alert fish owners – i.e., the ones trying for fry – make sure their fish hatch inside a special enclosure.  Clearly things had already gotten out of hand at our house, and now we had to round up the results. My early stints in babysitting taught me a little about the challenges of putting children into bed. My husband and I may have assembled a slightly smaller and cheaper crib than yours. But I beg you to imagine that your children measure less than a centimeter, are lightning fast and loose in 40 gallons of fishy water. Plus there are at least a hundred of them, and if you don’t catch them, they will be eaten alive.

“A large female can lay as many as 10,000 eggs,” A Complete Pet Owner’s Manual says.  Then the fish “greedily eat as many eggs as they can find.” Numerous as the fishies were, it seemed the population had been already been whittled down.

We got to work. While I had purchased a tiny fish net, my husband perfected a technique whereby he ambushed the fry with a glass measuring cup. By plunging it gently into the water, the fry were sucked into it and he sometimes nabbed as many as two or three at a time, while I was lucky to get one in the net.

The capturing went on sporadically throughout the weekend. In the meantime, I learned that unlike human parenting, bringing up goldfish in the recommended fashion may not be a pursuit the average person can handle properly. I will cope with the looming questions of who will adopt the babies and what one website calls the “challenge of feeding hundreds of fish” when I get there (one website urges feedings every four hours). But guidelines on healthy water conditions, safe filtration and frequent feeding of diverse, high-quality foods rapidly give way to more troubling instructions.

They’re not going to a fishbowl in the White House – surely somebody with a lopsided tail could live happily in a pond where no-one will be looking too closely? Apparently not. I am supposed to “cull” the fish over the next six months: as soon as I can tell which ones are the prettiest, I dispose of the rest (though no-one gives any advice as to how). One book says that only “one percent” of the babies should ultimately survive. In short, those who become successful goldfish breeders, unlike worthwhile human parents, must have a touch of the mass-murdering eugenicist. The irony of nurturing the fish for months with proper protein and pH only to massacre 99% of them seems lost on goldfish experts.

For now, the three big fish seem to have completely forgotten any role they may have played in the addition of the underwater crib. Perhaps they can see the fry in there. Perhaps the First Bites are filtering delectably out. Whatever the reason, the parents are intrigued by the crib in their tank. Or maybe they’re enjoying some shark cage fantasies.

The fry are nearing a week old and their progress, I’m sure you’ll agree, is nothing short of stunning. From clinging to the sides of the pen, they dart freely in search of food and sport mouths along with the tiny, transparent beginnings of fins and tails. So far they’re enjoying First Bites, brine shrimp, algae and crumbled hardboiled egg yolk.

Thursday: Day One. Mouthless babies cling to the side of the crib.

 

Monday. Swimming, chomping food, and beginning to harass each other.

As a parent, I’m contemplating my next move. Perhaps I could pitch a reality show – my brood puts the Duggars’ in the shade, or maybe America would like to vote on which fish survive. Perhaps I should launch a political platform on the value of ichthyological abstinence and the risks of underwater cohabitation. And I definitely need to befriend someone with a roomy goldfish pond. In the meantime, I’ll be sure to keep you updated – I bet you can’t bear to miss a moment of my baby fish.

 

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Posted in Animals, The Goldfish Fry Saga | 8 Comments »

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