Goldfish Fry Sustainable Hide Outs

by Michel
(Queensland, Australia)

Can I put some clear glass small necked bottle that lay on the bottom and clear plastic btls that float on the surface and half fill with water in a large inside aquarium and large outside ponds for the small goldfish to hide in. So I can see them and they can swim in and out.

My ponds are a metre deep and my aquarium is 600cm deep so it has been impossible to trap them to transfer them to smaller inside aquariums.

I want sustainable methods that don't require continue 'interference' from me to enable smaller babies to survive.

I make my own goldfish food and the adults are quite large and are about 10 years +. Some have died recently because I had to pack them up to move. But now and in the past I have had to purchase smaller ones because I can't catch the fry and babies quick enough to separate them.

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Grant’s Reply

Hi Michel

Your idea of the bottles could work as long as the fry or small Goldfish are prepared to swim into them.

Goldfish tend to swim in open areas and don’t actively hide in burrows or tunnels like some fish species do unless forced to.

Your idea is easy enough to test, but there may be other options available to you.

For your ponds, can you create shallow areas for fry or small fish to take refuge in? Taking your idea a step further, you could submerge a shallow plastic or glass open topped container a few millimetres under the surface so small fish could swim over the container lip. You could then put small amounts of food into the area regularly that would encourage smaller fish to gather there without danger from larger fish.

This technique would also work in your aquarium. The trick is to only put small amounts of food in the container at the same time each day. Goldfish quickly learn where and when to expect food.

You don’t mention if you have aquatic plants in your ponds. They would give your fry somewhere to hide until they were big enough to avoid being eaten.

The other obvious solution is to breed your fish in a controlled way by providing spawning mops for them to spawn on.

You would need to remove any aquatic plants so the fish only spawned on the mops, which you would then remove and raise the fry in your aquariums.

You are in the middle of your Goldfish breeding season, so now would be the ideal time to try this option.

Check out the Goldfish breeding section for details on how and when Goldfish spawn.