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Housing a goldfish isn't as simple as buying a bowl. It’s up to you to take on what you can handle so you can provide your goldfish the healthy environment it deserves. Not everyone has the time to dedicate to daily or weekly water changes. If your goldfish is in a small bowl or tank, you’ll need to perform very frequent water changes, sometimes even daily, to maintain the water quality. The smaller the tank or the more goldfish in the tank, the more frequently you’ll need to perform water changes to keep parameters in check. Your filter can only do so much of the work for you! Invest in an accurate water testing kit that allows you to monitor your tank’s parameters, like ammonia and nitrates, to ensure the water quality is staying in tip-top shape. It cannot be stressed enough that maintaining water quality is the top priority for goldfish keeping. What’s the Most Important Aspect of My Goldfish’s Tank? Introducing novel items from time to time will keep things interesting, and goldfish will never turn down an interesting snack. You wouldn’t want to live in a room with four blank walls and nothing to do, and neither does your goldfish! These social fish need entertainment and enrichment, which can be achieved with air stones, plants, and various types of décor. Enrichment Image Credit: Krysja, Shutterstock If your goldfish is in a small bowl and you add in a filter, plants, and décor, then you’ve eliminated essentially all of the swimming space in your fish’s environment. You should also consider the other things you are adding to the tank. Round bowls and tanks usually do not provide much long swimming space. Rectangular tanks usually make the best tanks for goldfish, although some cube-shaped tanks can work well. Goldfish enjoy swimming long lengths, which means they do best in long tanks versus tall tanks. Swimming Space Image Credit: TIPAKORN MAKORNSEN, Shutterstock You aren’t going to over-filtrate the water, but you absolutely can under-filtrate the water. A filter that is rated for tanks larger than the tank your goldfish lives in is going to be your best bet for proper filtration. Goldfish produce a high bioload, which means their waste products build up rapidly, even in large tanks. What Does My Goldfish’s Tank Need? Filtration Image Credit: Andrey_Nikitin, Shutterstock What this doesn’t mean is that you should keep your goldfish in a 1-gallon bowl its entire life, but it does mean that your small goldfish is extremely unlikely to reach 12 inches in length in a 5-gallon tank.
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The more goldfish you have in a given space, the higher these hormone levels will be. Goldfish release some types of growth-inhibiting hormones, which build up in the water and, essentially, tell your goldfish’s body to stop growing. Interestingly enough, science tells us that’s mostly true. You may have heard that goldfish will only grow to the size of their environment. If you just adopted a 10-year-old goldfish from your friend’s pond, then you’re probably dealing with a fish that is much too large for a 10-gallon tank. If you just got a feeder goldfish from the fair or pet store, then your fish will be perfectly happy in a tank smaller than 10 gallons.
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The simplest answer to this question is that tank size isn’t as important as other aspects of tank care are. How Important is Tank Size for Goldfish? Image Credit: Sad Agus, Shutterstock Here are the things you should know about the importance of tank size for goldfish. The good news for you is that those “rules” are outdated and not based on science, but for some people, that makes it even more confusing to figure out what size tank to get for a goldfish. You may have even encountered people who accused you of abuse or encouraged you to get rid of your goldfish when they found out you’re keeping a goldfish in a 10-gallon tank. The two most common seem to be 1 gallon for every 1 inch of fish and 20 gallons for a single fish with 10 gallons added for each additional fish. Whether you’re new to the goldfish world or have been keeping goldfish for decades, you’ve likely heard some rule of thumb describing the tank size that goldfish require.