Little goldfish are boring. They barely venture out from hiding in the plants. And when they do, they just cautiously flit around a bit and go back into hiding. So why am I checking on them at least 10 times a day?
They are half translucent and the other half is the color of the little gravel at the bottom. They’re hard to find among the plants and the camouflage. They don’t cooperate when I try to take attendance. It usually takes half the day before I get a glimpse of the two at the same time.
It reminds me of my joking reaction when friends and family have brought home babies from the hospital. It’s the miracle of life. I get it. But does it do any tricks yet? Except this time the joke’s on me. I’m the guy checking 10 times a day to see how his little kids are doing.
These two guys are kind of miraculous. Google says female goldfish lay up to 10,000 eggs. These are the only two left. I don’t know about the fittest, but surely survival of the luckiest. They seem to be doing well, which I guess means they aren’t floating upside down at the top and they seem to be eating.
I feed them a pinch of crushed goldfish pellets a few times a day. I don’t know what they ate before I knew they were there. Algae, I guess and scraps of whatever I fed the snails? They are really small and I can see them eating the tiniest particles in the water. Maybe they ate snail eggs. I have mystery snails and nerite snails that I bought. Nerites are infamous for laying infertile eggs all over a tank. And I have some bladder snails, widely considered a pest snail, who also lay tiny eggs everywhere.
If I’d known I had goldfish fry in there, I would have fed them.
I spent a bunch of time down a rabbit hole on Google the last couple of days. Professional breeders might get 30 percent fry hatching from all those eggs, according to one estimate. Many breeders get 30 percent survival from those that hatch, according to another source. That would be 9 percent of the original 10,000 for serious breeders if both those estimates are right. First time breeders often get no survivors, according to another “guy on the internet.”
I’m lucky to have two without trying, I guess. They could be three or four weeks old, based the online photos and videos. They’re not out of the woods yet. They’re in a tank with good water quality and a guy who feeds them several times a day. They are afraid of me, unlike their parents and the other big guys in the big tank who worship me as the God of Fish Pellets. We’ll see if we can get these guys from here back into the big tank.
Leave a Reply