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Here are four reasons why bowls are not suitable for goldfish: 1. Goldfish bowls are too small to filter. If you have a pet cat, the movement of a goldfish swimming around in a bowl can be incredibly tempting. If the bowl doesn’t have a cover, Tibbles could easily hook out your fish with her paw while you’re not around to stop her. There’s no enjoyment in keeping an animal in poor conditions where it cannot growand thrive, so get a new tank asap. “Sorry but I’m keeping my goldfish bowl!”
Goldfish bowls cannot easily accommodate a filter system, and without one, the water rapidly becomes polluted. Ammonia burns the fish’s gills, eventually causing suffocation and death. Why is this step optional? The flow from the filtershould cause enough surface agitation to getplenty of oxygen into your water without theneed for an air pump. However, if you’re planning to keep your water at a high temperature then you should definitely get an air pump, asa higher temperature will reduce the amountof oxygen in your tank water. Step 2b (optional): Add a heater. Get a bigger tank as soon as possible! Ideally 20 gallons for one goldfish. If you have morethan one goldfish then add 10 gallons for eachadditional fish. ie. 20 gallons for one goldfish, 30gallons for two fish, 40 gallons for three fish, etc. Cycling is the process of building up a colony of “good bacteria” that will convertdangerous chemicals into less dangerous chemicals. There are three chemicals that youneed to know about:Try to look for a “long” style tank. They’re a bitshallower, but they contain the same amount of water because they are longer than standard tanks. This maximises surface area andswimming space! Many newbies to fishkeeping assume that a goldfish bowl or small tank is easier to maintain than a large one, but that’s not the case. Change some of your fish’s water once per week, remembering to treat the new water with Seachem Prime before adding it to your tank.
Stop feeding your goldfish more than once every three days. And even then, only feed avery tiny pinch of food and remove any uneaten food after one minute. And whether your current goldfish lives a long life or not, the knowledgeyou gain here could lay the foundation for many enjoyable years of goldfish keeping. What to do if your goldfish is in a bowl Goldfish need lots of dissolved oxygen in the water to thrive. Goldfish bowls have a very small surface area, making efficient gaseous exchange impossible, so the water will always be short of that crucial oxygen the fish need. Unstable Water Parameters You can accidentally stop the cycling processif you clean your filter incorrectly! Never cleanyour filter in tap water. It will kill the goodbacteria living inside the filter and effectivelyun-cycle your tank.Why? Because the more you feed, the more polluted the water will get. But goldfish cansurvive on very little food for a long time. Continue to change 20% of the tank water every day. And 50%, or as much as necessary, when ammonia and nitrite spike above 0.5ppm. Why? Goldfish produce a lot of waste and can grow to be over a foot long. A big, long tank gives them room to grow, space to swim andallows a stable colony of “good bacteria” to develop. This bacteria converts harmful chemicals into less harmful chemicals (more on thislater!). A big tank is key to goldfish health The difficult bit is keeping your fish alive and healthy during the cycling process! To do this, you need to regularly take water readings using a test kit (we recommend the API Freshwater Master test kit) and change some of your fish’s water whenever ammonia ornitrite levels get too high. Ideally, you would cycle a new tank before adding any fish. However, as we’re assuming that your fish was already in an uncycledbowl or small tank, it made sense to go ahead and add them to the larger tank anddo what’s known as a “fish-in cycle” rather than a“fishless cycle”. Your tank will go through thecycling process with the fish already inside. Cycling your tank
Even if a bowl was a suitable home for any type of fish (which it’s not!), goldfish would be the last on the list.You should plan for fancy goldfish to grow to roughly the size of a softball at maturity, and the single tailed varieties get even larger. Goldfish bowls don’t have cover slides or lids, leaving the top open. That presents several dangers to the fish. A filter will help to keep your fish alive for a while,though, unfortunately, probably not for very long. Preparing your new tank For the reasons mentioned above, a goldfish bowl is not a suitable container for a goldfish, period. The aim of this goldfish bowl guide For a balanced diet, feed your fish a combination of flakes, pellets, bloodworms, brineshrimp and peas with the shells removed. TestingIf you absolutely must keep your goldfish in abowl or small tank then you should continue tofollow the steps above and add a small filter too.
Did you know that in October 2005, the lawmakers in Rome, Italy, passed a by-law that bans keeping goldfish in goldfish bowls? Other countries, including Switzerland, have since followed suit. But, as we just said, nitrite is still bad for your fish. So how do we then get rid of thenitrite? We convert it to nitrate. Add a filter—making sure that you choosea big enough filter for your tank! We recommend Fluval U-series filters, which come inmodels U1 (the smallest), U2, U3 and U4 (the biggest). The most important step is, of course, getting a bigger tank. A goldfish is very unlikely tosurvive for long in a bowl. And, even if yourgoldfish did somehow survive long-term in agoldfish bowl, it would almost certainly suffer significant discomfort and would not grow to its full potential.Once you have a nice new tank you should follow these steps to move your fish to its more spacious home: Step 1:
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