I found a local goldfish keeper, who’s name is Morten, who had goldfish babies back in may. He has been growing them out ever since, and recently tried selling them. I decided to buy some from him, so I drove over to him to check them out but also to check his hydroponic system out that he had shared on the sales post. He has a sun room, where he has a large setup to grow tomatoes in. I love experiments like this and wanted to have a look.
The setup was amazing. The tank was fairly small but the system has a lot more water in it, so it did not really matter. According to Morten, the system can keep up very well during the simmer, when the plants absorb all the nutrients, but during the winter it seems to struggle. He mentioned that it may be because he’s still learning how much food they need when it get colder.
The babies were quite a bit smaller than I expected, but I had the chance to see their parents, who were really nice fish imported from The Netherlands. He had them in a black tub, so unlike the image above, I wasn’t able to take a decent look at them before picking the ones that I took. I simply took 10 that seemed different from above. Morten had culled a couple of times and already removed most of the fish that had bad tails and no dorsal fins, although he could promise nothing.
I picked one “black” that would turn orange at some point, but interestingly, this was a bully fish. It was way larger than the rest, and would swim around and bite the others! You can clearly see that it has a pretty big belly and is substantially larger than the rest.
I brought them home, placed them in a 90 liter (20 gal) tub and moved a cycled filter from my main tank over. I expected this to work well, because the tub was the same size as Mortens, but I only had 10 fish, compared to the 50 or 100 fish that he had in his. After acclimatizing them, I started feeding them pretty often, but with small portions. They did eat pretty well, but after a few days they seemed to be struggling. I could not see any issues with nitrites, but I had no test for ammonia. I simply assumed that I may have overfed them.
After 5 or 6 days I realized that they were seriously struggling. They seemed to have been infected with a fungus of sorts, and although I tried to stop it with large water changes and salt, I only managed to save one baby! Eventually, after some thought, i believe that the fish died due to ammonia poisoning. I assume that moving a precycled filter into a new tub, with used water, was, despite expectations, not enough to cycle the setup enough, to carry the bio-load of 10 babies!
I kept the single survivor in a bucket, until it stabilized but I eventually decided to move it over to my main tank. Although it seemed large enough to not be eaten, the largest fish did chase it around, and it acted scared. It would stay at the bottom of the tank or right above one of the filters and even seemed to be struggling with the water movement, so I eventually decided to make a baby cage for it.
This has helped the little fish a lot!I have placed the cage quite close to a filter outlet, so that the water gets circulated and aerated. The plants give some protection and things for it to investigate. I pour a few liters of water into the container, simply to flush food left overs out and to avoid them rotting.
Personally I am fairly pleased with the setup that was a quick fix to this problem. The only very important thing to remember is, to move the baby over to a bucket whenever I do water changes.
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