# goldfish help for project



## oldguy83 (Mar 12, 2010)

i have to do a project for my bio class. my partner and i chose to do it on the growth rate of goldfishes in different habitats. Ex. 10 fishes in a small bowl versus 10 fishes in a big bowl..which ones will grow the best with the same amount of care. pretty basic project. but my teacher also wants us to tie the project in with ecology ( scientific study of the distributions, abundance and relations of organisms and their interactions with the environment). 

So my question is, what type of environmental factors do wild goldfish have in the wild? 

does anybody have sources/journals/articles of the effects of wild goldfish in a habitat. 

anything would help at this point.
-growth rate
-size
-effects of wild goldfish with other species in a habitat

where can we baby goldfishes? i assume that we would be able to record growth of baby fishes faster than adult fishes. 



thanks for reading...cheers


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## TheOldSalt (Jan 28, 2005)

Hooboy, are you ever about to get an earfull ( eyefull? ) from the denizens of this site. To keep 10 goldfishes in a small bowl is an unpardonable sin around here, lemmetellya.

Using baby goldfish will be much more helpful to you, yes. You can often get very small ones as "feeders" in many petshops, but if you really need babies, then you'll have to find a breeder. The petshops can help you with this by contacting their suppliers and having them contact their own suppliers. This is normally not done, but for a science project you can sometimes get them to be much more helpful than normal. I would also recommend the Aquabid website for direct access to breeders, but you said "cheers" which may indicate that you are in Great Britain where Aquabid won't be much help. 

You no doubt already know that the fish in the larger container will grow slightly faster, but if you change the water enough in the smaller one, you can get the opposite result.

Growth Inhibitor Hormone (GIH) is exuded from young fish into the water. In the event of enough of the stuff building up to be measurable, which would happen in the event of overcrowding, the growth rate of the fish is slown dramatically. Changing enough water prevents this hormone from having an effect, thusly allowing unimpeded growth. Naturally, the bigger the body of water, the less the effect of GIH, and the faster the growth rate of the fish.

The problem you will face is this:
To even keep 10 goldfish _alive_ in a bowl will require massive and frequent water changes. This will ruin your experiment, wasting your time and effort utterly.

As for the effects of goldfish on the other species in a given habitat, the answer is-- it depends. The general answer is that this is never a good thing for those other species. Goldfish make a huge mess of things.

They grow fairly quickly when very young. Being about dime-sized in one month and quarter-sized in another. After that growth slows considerably.


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## Guest (Mar 13, 2010)

TOS said it all.


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## oldguy83 (Mar 12, 2010)

TheOldSalt said:


> Hooboy, are you ever about to get an earfull ( eyefull? ) from the denizens of this site. To keep 10 goldfishes in a small bowl is an unpardonable sin around here, lemmetellya.
> 
> Using baby goldfish will be much more helpful to you, yes. You can often get very small ones as "feeders" in many petshops, but if you really need babies, then you'll have to find a breeder. The petshops can help you with this by contacting their suppliers and having them contact their own suppliers. This is normally not done, but for a science project you can sometimes get them to be much more helpful than normal. I would also recommend the Aquabid website for direct access to breeders, but you said "cheers" which may indicate that you are in Great Britain where Aquabid won't be much help.
> 
> ...



thanx for the info..


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