Quiz: Tell me how to properly take care of a Comet Goldfish?

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Orangematz

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A little quiz that I have for you "experts" and non-experts.

How many gallons? (if your answer is above 10 Gallons for a single Goldfish, tell me why they need a big tank for just one Goldfish.)
How much filtration?
How many inches do Comets reach?
What other kinds of fish can you put with a Comet?
 
75+ gallons minimum, because they're dirty fish that grow huge.
double filtration
They can get pretty large, up to 12-14 inches
As far as tank mates, I never snuggest tank mates for any Goldfish, as they can be territorial.
 
I'm not gonna answer the first 3 answers, b/c probably i might get thumbs down like always.
but the 4th one on tank mates for comet goldfish?
1. Shubunkin goldfish (single-tailed, same variety as comet, pond fish)
2. Common goldfish (single-tailed, same variety as comet, pond fish)
3. Wakin goldfish (Twin tailed, pond fish)
4. Koi (maybe, only if its the same size as the comet, then its fine).
 
Take a 55 gallon tank, fill with water and gravel, place a filter system in tank for at least a 75 gallon tank.
Allow water to cycle through filter for about 10 days.
Then place 1 comet goldfish in bag rom store and allow it to set for a hour.
Open bag and release.
Feed and walk away.
Next day if it is still alive you did a great job.
Comets can and often grow to 6 inches in first year then rapidly after that if they survive.
What can you put in with it 1 medium size pleco.
 
It can take up to 6 weeks for a tank to cycle.. Yes, my answer is above 10 gallons. You are talking a fish that can grow in excess of 10 inches and puts out the waste of fish 3 times its size. You can have the water tested to see if the tank has finished cycling at your local fish store. It is better then poisoning a fish to find out.

In my book, 30 gallon is a minimum as a holding tank until you build the pond.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfish

The 1 inch of fish to one gallon of water rule of thumb fails when filtered through common sense.

Okay, maybe 55 one inch fish can fit into a 55 gallon tank and it would make perfect sense to try with the proper filter.

So let us put a single 55 inch fish into that 55 gallon aquarium. Why not? One gallon per inch works with the rule. But a 55 gallon aquarium is 48 inches long and what if our 55 inch fish was 23 inches horizontally? He would be taller than the tank. And if his girth was 18 inches? The aquarium is not big enough to make him a sardine can.

One inch per gallon rule is a fail!

Oh, but let's go back an apply the rule to small fish. Okay, koi and gold fish let's get 55 one inch of those! Hey, they fit into the tank, right? Wrong, the bioload from them is huge. You have to consider them for their full grown size of 10 or more inches. Let's take 10 inches, that means 5 can go into this tank with room to spare, right?

Wrong! These are heavy bodied fish who frankly are dirty fish. They produce about 3 times the waste of many other fish their body length. So let's divide by 3. 5 divided by 3 means one whole fish. Yes 1 goldfish and perhaps a bristle nose pleco to clean the tank, but remember you are bring a fish from a total different environment and the strains of illnesses that each have not seen for thousands of years. Not really good. I would stick to a strictly goldfish tank.


Let's examine the opposite extreme. Let's look at a light bodied fish. Take a kuhli loach for example. They get to 4.5 inches, but let's count them as 5 inches just for the ease in doing the math. Minimum tank size for a kuhli loach is 10 gallons, but this is not due to bio-load. They need this room to move. and they can hurt themselves in anything smaller. Kuhli loaches live longer in groups of at least 3. Guess what? The bio-load of 3 in a 10 gallon, is not a problem. So 55 gallons/ 5 inch fish = 11 fish right? Run that through aqadvisor.com. What is the tank load? 40% without a filter! 22 fish - nearly 110 inches worth puts only a 65% bio-load on the tank, 33 fish or 165 inches worth of fish, 88 percent bioload, and to top it off, 40 kuhli loaches get us up to 200 inches of fish and the tank is now at 102% bio-load. That is not any one inch per gallon. And imagine if you put a good sized filter on the tank.

You need to look at the needs of each species and not play a broken record that was not ever right.


Get away from parroting the one inch per gallon rule or fish grow to the size of their tank. Neither ever made sense when you though them out and now that we have online calculators to figure a number of things out - including species compatibility at the same time, let's make use of them.
aqadvisor.com is one amoung many. Is it perfect. No, but neither is my wet wear calculator called a brain. Play it smarter than I did when I was young and use the tools at hand. You are not as stupid as a parrot.
 
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