giving away baby goldfish
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today we took about fifty of our baby goldfish to a store in Tachikawa where the proprietor (and only employee, it seems) agreed to take the off-spring of Emma's fish. I suspect they will all become feeders but I'm very pleased with our ability to produce so many healthy fish. As the babies grow, I am desperate to reduce the total headcount for two related reasons:
First, it gets hard to assure that all of the fish are getting fed. They can all eat the algae that exists in the tank, but that's not enough. I started the fish on very high-maintenance chicken egg yolk, but that stuff turns toxic in hours and I had to keep cleaning it out. Then I switched to live brine shrimp, but that's quite labor intensive as well and it's crazy how fast those shrimp die off and/or get devoured. As I switch to frozen daphnia and then solid food, I'll be finding a balance between providing enough food and .. poisoning the water.
Because, second: it gets increasingly difficult to ensure that the water chemistry stays safe: all that poo means a lot of ammonia entering the water, which is poisonous. There's a cycle involving three types of bacteria that renders the ammonia into nitrite and the nitrite into nitrate and then neutralizes the nitrate, but: nitrite is also bad for for fish, just better than ammonia; nitrate is also bad for fish, just better than nitrite; and the final cycle requires an anaerobic environment, which cannot exist in the small plastic tub we're using to house the fish.
