drferox:

Look, I’m just going to let this question go out to the rest of fishblr. I’m sure they’ll take care of you.

Yep, goldfish change color sometimes.

Comet goldfish should get to 8″ long, at least, and often grow to be more like a foot. Bare minimum tank size for one is 75 gallons, and yes, you should have a filter. Just about all fish need filters, and the few that don’t need one will do better with one. 

If you’ve just found out that you aren’t properly caring for your fish, don’t panic. Do large water changes in the meantime, try and find a larger tank on Craigslist (good for large cheap tanks) or on sale at Petco, and get a large, strong filter.

fourteen–steps:

Well I did this? A couple months back I legit looked up the ingredients to every single commercial goldfish food I could find and ranked them roughly by quality, for easy reference when people on my forum mentioned them. So uh, yeah. I have them all nicely color coded in a notebook but as I can’t do that here, I’ll just list them in sections instead. 

The best!

These are good staple foods with high quality ingredients and balanced nutrition. They of course should be mixed with plenty of fresh and frozen foods as well, but these should make up a good portion of their daily feeding. 

• AAP Paradigm
• New Life Spectrum
• Omega One Goldfish Pellets
• Repashy Soilent Green

Not bad

May be rotated in with other staple foods for variety, but should not be used regularly. Some have slightly lower quality ingredients or a few too many fillers, others are good quality but not well balanced for daily feeding.

• AquaDine Duraflake
• Aqueon Goldfish Granules
• Cobalt Pellets
• Drs. Foster and Smith
• Encore Goldfish
• Fluval Bug Bites Goldfish Formula
• Hagen Fluval Goldfish Pellets
• Hikari Saki Red
• New Era Pellets
• Repashy Super Green

If you have to..?

Passable if you’ve really got nothing else on hand, but otherwise don’t waste your money. Feeding these long term is not going to be healthy for your fishies.

• API Goldfish food
• Azayaka 
• Hikari Lionhead/Gold/Oranda Gold/Excel – Hikari foods have gone to shit in the last couple years, all full of fillers and poor quality meals. A pretty good recipe for swim bladder issues in a fancy. Saki is the only one I’d even touch now tbh, and still it’s not all that awesome. 
• Nat Geo Goldfish Flakes
• Seachem Nutridiet Goldfish
• TetraSmart Goldfish

No.

Please do not, seriously. 

• Azoo 9
• Marineland Color Enhancing Goldfish
• TetraFin Plus Goldfish
• TetraFin Goldfish Crisps
• Wardley Advanced (Hartz)
• Wardley Vacation Feeder Blocks

Dear god no please I beg of you

Holy shit how do they sELL THIS STUFF?!?!!? Feat. the reasons I am horrified.

• Laguna Pellets – first four ingredients are fillers, plus contains hydrolyzed poultry feathers. Apparently feather meal often contains traces of poultry antibiotics and other chemicals including inorganic arsenic 🙂🙃🙂
• Purina AquaMax – pretty much all fillers and preservatives. Some more yummy poultry byproducts in there. And I mean. Come on. Did anyone even know Purina made fish food???
• TetraColor Goldfish Granules – 8 of the first 10 ingredients are fillers… Wheat, starch, corn, oat, soy gluten, wheat germ, yeast oh my gooddddddd
• TopFin Goldfish Flakes – unspecified “protein” listed as first ingredient. Seriously. Just “protein”. Buncha fillers and artificial colors. Zero actual real ingredients. Zip. None. This is PetSmart’s flagship brand and there is literally no food in this.
• Wardley Goldfish – Ooooh we have eight different fillers, plus fish bone meal! I just got a bad pet food bingo!

If anyone else has a food I didn’t mention that they can send me an ingredient list for I’d definitely appreciate it :3