Breeding Goldfish for the First Time… and It Worked!

A couple months ago, I tried my hand at breeding goldfish. It was sort of out of curiosity and I've never done this before. And as you can see, it worked. I definitely wasn't sure if I was doing it right. I had no idea how to do it, but you can see the results here and we have definitely over 30 little baby goldfish that have been growing out over the last couple of months and are now starting to look like their parents and they're super happy and healthy. So I'm gonna run you guys through the entire process of what I did. Hopefully, if you wanna do the same thing as me, you can just follow this video all the way through. This whole project started when I initially wanted to get goldfish because even though I've got a vast experience in this hobby I really have no experience with goldfish and it's because I went straight into tropicals and kind of skipped the goldfish phase which most beginners go through. So despite goldfish being the most popular aquarium fish I've never really had much to do with them until now. So I started off by growing out some goldfish from my store. In here, these guys love me. These are my goldfish and I have been feeding these a ton of bug buffet and I've been feeding them a ton of green cuisine and I'm growing them out because I wanna try and breed some goldfish. One morning I noticed the males chasing the females around the tank and just going nuts, like constantly pursuing them and not really leaving them alone. And it was in the morning after a water change. They were swimming really erratically and constantly nudging at the sides of the females. So I knew it was time to try and spawn them. Now the way to tell male and female goldfish can be a little bit tricky. You have to wait until they're much older. I think goldfish can spawn when they're quite young but it's way better to use older broodstock than younger broodstock. I've found the older my goldfish have gotten, the better they are at breeding and the easier it is to tell whether they're males or females. And the dead giveaway is that males will get these like pimply looking things. They actually kind of look like white spot on their face and that's probably the easiest way to tell. But once you start hand spawning these, you're gonna be able to tell straight away because you'll get milk or you're gonna get eggs. I could have thrown a spawning mop in there and it's likely they would have laid some eggs on the spawning mop but I thought I'd intervene and just do it the traditional method that most people do nowadays. And I'm definitely gonna get a little bit of backlash for this but I decided to hand spawn them. Just out of interest, I know it's a little bit weird and iffy and I mean at first impression it does look quite traumatic but I'm here to say that it's definitely fine for the fish. They were honestly probably relieved that I gave them a helping hand. These fish have been inbred for hundreds of years and they're nothing like what they were in the wild. They're a human creation and unfortunately, sometimes they need a little bit of human help to get them through. So I decided to hand spawn them and what I did was I got one of my little five gallon glass tanks and put a really shallow amount of water, held them in my hand and slowly pressed down on their abdomen very, very gently. I was putting no pressure on them. I was not causing any harm to the fish. I was being super gentle and delicate and just helping them to release that milk and those eggs. And what I would do was I just mix them up. There's plenty of videos on YouTube and way more in depth on how to hand spawn them but the process is dead easy. All you have to do is get the goldfish, basically give them a little squeeze after you've fattened them up and they're gonna lay eggs and milk everywhere. And within 24 hours, you're gonna know whether you've got viable eggs or not. I think it's important to note that you don't wanna force it when it comes to hand spawning. You really have to wait until the fish is ready and the dead giveaway is when they're chasing each other around and you're not gonna mistake it. They start acting a whole lot more strange than what they normally do when they're ready to breed. So you just gotta kind of wait for that moment. Some things that definitely help to get them in the mood to breed is lots of live food but high protein foods work great. These are a really easy fish to breed. So even just feeding them pellets gets them in the mood. They're seriously super easy to get into breeding condition. So luckily for me, my females didn't have like too many eggs so I wasn't inundated with fry. I put them in a little hatching tank. I kept them at about 23 degrees Celsius. I put an air stone in the tank to create a gentle flow of water through the eggs and keep them oxygenated. And after a couple of days, they began to hatch. And within four days, they began free swimming. Now it was time to feed them. What I did to feed them, they are tiny little babies. Like they're incredibly small and they're not gonna take to live baby brine shrimp from day one. What I did to start these off was I added green water to the tank. So I keep a culture of green water around. I added some green water in there and this is just full of microscopic organisms which those babies can actually eat. But if you don't have any green water, I would recommend setting up an infusoria culture. And if you're even too lazy to do that, you can probably get away with just using bug buffet, crushing it up into a fine dust and making sure those babies are getting fed. Just a light coating. And it falls through the water and the goldfish eat the chunks on the way down. And then I've got those mystery snails in there to help clean up the dust that doesn't get eaten and keep the water quality good. I had an incredibly good success rate with my babies. So I don't think I lost any of them that hatched out, maybe one or two, but these are mostly all of the viable eggs that I had. I kept them in that little five gallon tank and kept raising the water level up as they got bigger. A few days after they were eating the green water and the powdered food, I started to introduce some brine shrimp in there as well. So they started to eat the Bohe Bay brine shrimp that I feed them. This is a little bit of a smaller hatchling so they can actually take it a little bit earlier on. And the second they get onto brine shrimp, you're pretty much in the clear. They're really, really easy to raise up after that. So once they were through this delicate stage, I just continued the water changes and continued growing them up until they were about a centimeter in size. And then I moved them to this two foot tank where they've been pretty much ever since. When they grow out, they're kind of like, they're not the best swimmers. They take a little while to learn how to swim with those weird fins that they've got that are definitely not natural, but they slowly learn. Yeah, now you can see today, they're all doing well. So these aren't like world-class goldfish. They're just your basic black moors. And I'm not even sure what kind of colors we're gonna get out of this batch, but I'm just happy to see any kind of fish and any kind of life being raised up here in the room. They're super cute. They're always down to eat and they can eat an incredible amount of food. I would like to create a bit more of an in-depth video at some point, but I just wanted to show you guys these babies and how I went with the breeding process and see if anyone was really interested in seeing a goldfish breeding video, like really in-depth, maybe a half an hour long going through the whole process. But let me know down below if you would like that. I think the breeding process was fairly easy and I'd rate these guys like a two or a three out of 10 in hardness for breeding. They were not hard to breed at all. The adults I still have breed pretty much every day. I constantly hear them splashing around in their tank and that's just them chasing each other and laying eggs. So they're definitely easy. You just have to get some nice big fat breeders and you're definitely gonna be able to spawn them. I think it's worth noting too, to have somewhere to sell them before you breed a hundred of these because it's very easy to create a lot of them and raising up thousands of them is probably not the best idea unless you have somewhere to offload them because yeah, they do get big but they're like little water puppies and I'm absolutely in love. So I'm definitely gonna be breeding some different colors and some more fancy ones. But yeah, for now I've really had a good time breeding them. So they're so cute. I've loved it. So thank you so much for watching this video and I'll see you guys in the next one.