My New Friend

    About a month ago, I adopted a goldfish from the preschool where I've been student teaching. His water was pretty scummy and he wasn't really eating, and the regular teachers at the site didn't have the time to take care of him as well as they wanted, and my head teacher mentioned that she'd been thinking about flushing him.

    I, however, am a wee bit of an animal-lover, and while I'd never had a fish before, I couldn't bear the thought of flushing the poor little guy--he'd done nothing to earn that treatment. So I offered to take him home--a process that involved dumping him into the preschool sink by accident, then hurriedly scooping him into a plastic bag full of water and putting him in a little paper cup to give his water some structure so he'd have a bit of space to swim in. Then he got to hang out in the car and slosh around for thirty minutes while I drove home, and after that he had to survive living in a quart jar for a week while I ordered his current one-gallon home off Amazon. We're both pretty happy now that he has more than three cups of water-space to swim around in.

    So, meet Rory! After getting him home, I did a whole bunch of research on what I needed to take care of him properly.

  

    It turns out that goldfish are pretty high-needs fish--they need a specific kind of food and lots of room to swim; and while I am able to fulfill the first need for Rory (now that I've ordered proper goldfish food, at least; the preschool teachers were giving him something else that he just spit out if he wasn't desperate enough to eat it), I don't have the space or money for a proper 10+ gallon-tank setup. Oh, well. I'm pretty sure there aren't any folks in my area who do, so for now I've decided to give this little fish the best life I can. He lives on my desk where I'll never forget to feed him because I spend so much time here, and I've been changing his water about once a week (which is a far cry better than what he was getting before, which was maybe once a month if he was lucky). I'm feeding him twice a day, and he's gotten super perky and energetic compared to how he used to be. In these pictures, you can see that I've put three rocks in his jar; those are a new addition as of today to give him something new to explore, as my research turned up that goldfish are very curious little creatures.

    The other thing my research turned up, however, is that goldfish are criminally misunderstood by the vast majority of people.

    To start with, goldfish are a type of carp, which are voracious freshwater fish that tend to dominate the ecosystems they're introduced to (such as Utah Lake, which has been overrun with carp to the point that state law requires people who fish in Utah Lake to fish only for carp to try and mitigate the problem.)

    The problem with goldfish being carp is that it's generally illegal to release them into the wild, as they tend to dominate the local ecosystem. Additionally it's also illegal to flush them, because if the fish survives the piping, it will once again make it out into the wild and tend to dominate the ecosystem. Which basically means that, once saddled with Rory, I really had no legal way to be rid of him humanely even if I'd wanted to be, since I don't know anyone in my area who would have the resources to keep Rory in a proper 10-20 gallon tank with a filter and whatnot. Goldfish can also live for a very long time, so when a person buys a goldfish from a pet store and the fish dies within a week... well, it indicates a lack of knowledge, resources, or ability to care for the little critter properly, which is why you should always do your research before getting a pet (unlike me, who volunteered for the task, then did the research and realized that I'm rather inadequate for the task myself, even if I have more ability to take care of Rory than the preschool folks did. At least he seems happy most of the time, unlike before.). It's not that goldfish don't live very long--it's that most people who buy goldfish as an "easy" first pet for their child have no idea what goldfish really need for a long and happy life.

    Another interesting fact is that goldfish can grow really, really, really big if they have enough room for it--hence why all the expert fish-people out there say you need about 20 gallons of water for the first and an additional 10 gallons for each additional goldfish in the tank. They're also very messy compared to most other fish, and require much more rigorous filtering and water changes than other species in order to thrive (but, as carp, they are hardy enough that, as in Rory's case, a gallon of water, changed weekly, is enough for them to be happy enough; they just won't grow any bigger).

    Some goldfish also like music! Rory hasn't shown much musical inclination so far that I can tell (at least, music from my phone doesn't seem to excite him), but he does sometimes come over to watch me when I pull out my Irish whistles and start tootling tunes.

    At any rate, I'm pretty happy with my new friend. He's pretty quiet and keeps to himself, but he did find a way to communicate with me today that he was hungry--he kept swimming to the same corner of the jar and staring right at the bottle of food, and I finally figured out that when he does that, it's not because he's obsessed with the corner, it's because he wants to eat! Once I fed him, he went back to exploring his new rocks.