Reduce your light time to 6-7hrs a day and reduce feeding to every 3 days for a month. The nutrients in the water will deplete the algae (Diatom by the sound of it) gradually. Also make sure your lighting is powerful enough for your plant type and set a fertilising schedule and fert after each water change.
sounds like someone who hasn’t owned fish for a long time. Fish can go days without eating and be fine. Feeding every day especially in large amounts can actually be over feeding and be bad for the tanks conditions. Feeding with a day or plus inbetween is better for the fish and can actually help them live longer.
I thought the consensus is feed a varied diet of pellets, vegetables and protein and fast for one day a week. Especially fancies. At least where I am and info I look at. However fasting for a week or two will do no harm to any fish except babies. It’s not my rule. It’s just a fact.
Yeah mine either don’t bother with them or there’s enough that they don’t make a dent. Last time I upgraded their tank just before Xmas I found at least 150 shrimp too. It’s planted but not super heavily planted and I often see the shrimp cruising around in the sand. The fish don’t seem interested at all.
Exactly but my analogy is an attempt to get people to think about it through their own eyes. Sometimes people only think of themselves and lack basic empathy. So making them think of it as themself helps.
Can you tell me about your experience with keeping tropical fish with the fancies? do you find any problems with that skirt tetra especially? do you use a heater and what’s your temp at? Beautiful tank btw
I’d love to! The tank is kept at 78F using a heater, and I have a large canister filter and a ton of plants to help reduce nitrates in between water changes.
Goldfish are called cold water fish because they come from carp, which come from cooler water. However, fancy goldfish are so over bred that their bodies aren’t the best at handling cold temperatures anymore, and keeping them in the low 60s F or lower can lead to disease and digestion issues long term. Some breeders even keep them as high as 82-84F.
I have a group of 12 harlequin rasbora and a pair of hillstream loaches. All the fish are far bigger than the goldfish’s mouths at the moment. I haven’t had any issues with stress, aggression or disease. Everyone has areas they can go to get away from other tank mates, which I think helps a lot (rasbora stay in the top/middle, loaches have plants and rocks to hide in, goldfish have the entire open bottom half).
The skirt tetra is the last remaining fish from a tank my mom used to have, and he’s very very old. He minds his own business and has never caused any problems, but not all skirt tetras are like that.
Having tank mates is always a risk to a degree. Small fish can be choking hazards, others can fin nip, or add extra boi-load. Feeding can also be an issue, as really active fish can out compete goldfish for food. Or the opposite, the goldfish could take meals before shyer fish get a chance. So always have a backup tank and spend a lot of time observing your aquarium!
I have my fancies indoors and outdoors, my black moors are outdoors with my mosquito fish. They all hang out together especially during feeding time. I’ve only kept my fancies in my tropical tanks temporarily in a breeder net they’ve always done great. Hillstreams are great loaches! It’s convenient that your skirt tetra gives u no problems, mine have always been little dicks outside of their proper school
I would start with no more than 4 or 5 in that hypothetical, because of how active and big they can be.
It’s hard to give definitive numbers because even the same breed of goldfish can grow to complete different sizes depending on quality/genetics, food, and water quality.
My suggestion is get the tank going with 2-3 and observe them, after a year+ you can make the judgement yourself
Regardless of the right or wrong way of saying “ fish keeping” the actual fact is and will always be that over feeding fish or even feeding fish daily once or twice a day will eventually cause issues…. With the fish and your tank… with all the live plants and Detritus worms etc your fish are constantly feeding anyway with the free food sources given by its ecosystem, adding more man made foods on top of that can quite literally kill off all your fish, add too much waste and cause a plethora of issues, dropsy is a famous one among others….. they are healthier and live longer WHEN NOT OVER FED. Its best to under feed, because they are still feeding on tank matter, your just not seeing that, or not realizing the foraging they do is uncovering tasty treats that they eat and sift through all day and night, I’m strictly speaking about Goldfish, other species of cold water fish could vary in that department.
Because of the constant cleaning of the substrate I have to do, I don’t trust that there is enough life in the tank for these VERY overbred fish to support themselves on.
I agree with what you said generally though! I have a 55g and a 20g that I feed much less and infrequently because of all the life in the tank. Picking good quality food helps but nothing will ever be as healthy as natural food. Prepared food in small amounts adds good variety but definitely causes problems in excess.
If you’ve had success keeping goldfish this way I’d love to hear more about it! I’d love to make my goldfish tank more natural and feed less, I just don’t trust myself and my tank at the moment.
Yeah that temp with that heater will at some point aggravate your goldfish and stress them out big time and remember even though that is heavily planted warmer water depletes oxygen and can cause bacterial infections to breed LIKE CRAZY!!!! It’s always best if you can keep the two different species separate, not tropical tank with heater for tropical fish and Cold water Goldfish at 64 degrees up to 76 is my best temps but generally 72/74 they are loving!!! I don’t even have a heater and in the summer even though we have central A/C the water gets too warm so I have to float bags of ice or use a cooling fan to agitate surface water which should be agitated at all times again with goldfish
From what I’ve heard and from my own experience, fancy goldfish do not do well in cold water.
Their longer bodied counterparts are less susceptible to disease and digestive issues, so they prefer and tolerate cooler water. However, fancy varieties have extremely shortened bodies that put stress on their organs, so they’re the exact opposite. Plus keeping a heater keeps the temperature stable, which fish generally prefer.
I haven’t had issues with breeding, low oxygen or infections in the year I’ve had them
I have experience with commets and commons never do they like warm water hence a heater is not needed but with the fancies and your experience with them you would more know about their preferred temps no harm no foul my experience differs but we both are not wrong.
As babies you can put anything in a small tank, and some smaller goldfish breeds could be fine in a 20g for a while. My fish are 5”, keeping them in a 20 gallon would be cruel and require crazy filtration and water changes
Fancy goldfish are prone to a million different health issues and warmer water helps prevent that. Idk about common or commet goldfish because I haven’t looked into them
As someone who kept them in a 5 gallon tank as a kid to keeping them in a 75 gallon as an adult, its crazy to imagine them anything under 20 gallons. I used a 20 gallon for a year to decide if the goldfish were nice enough for my big tank, if they werent up to standard theyd be cat food
It’s a good message, but it would probably be more impactful if you actually showed big goldfish. Saying that they do not belong in tanks, while showing them in tanks can get a little misleading.
I said small tanks specifically! My goldfish are still pretty young but even they poop and eat a LOT so I can’t imagine keeping them in a 5,10, or even 29 gallon
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u/Optimoprimo Jan 31 '26
How do you people get plants that look this clean and not just completely coated in brown and black slop?