We accidentally (long story) won four goldfish at the county fair last night. We were able to give one away before we left. I planned to stop on my way home from work this evening and get the junk they need, but that’s several hours away. Last night I stuck them, and the water they came in, into a clear glass mixing bowl. I got a call from home a few minutes ago saying the fish are swimming sideways and gulping air at the top. What can I do to keep them alive for the next little bit till I can get home with their equipment? And what do they really need, anyway? Elmo keeps his goldfish in a regular fishbowl, but won’t it get gunky pretty quick? Don’t they need more oxygen? A pump seems rather far-fetched and pricey for eight-cent feeder goldfish, but I can’t flush them - my kids would freak. I suggested in another thread recently thatI might try goldfish if our Guinea pigs didn’t stop biting the dust so fast. At least these will be cheaper to replace, I guess. Ideas, anyone?
Hello, Yes there is something you can do. I hope I am not too late. First of all Change the water immediately. Like right now…This thread can wait.
OK now that you have changed the water they have a bit more oxygen. If you truely want to keep them, you can either change the water frequently, or buy a small ten gallon tank with all the fix’ins (filter, pump, gravel, heater etc…etc… I do not know where you are writing from but if you have a pet store near by you can pick all that up for under 30 $ USD. But if you prefer the Elmo route, All you need to do is change that water frequently to get enough oxygen. Enjoy!!!
I guess I was in a hurry before - I failed to mention that hubby was changing the water as I posted. So the fishbowl is acceptable, as long as I don’t mind changing the water every 15 minutes or so? I just put them in there last night, for the love of Pete. I guess it’s hard to tell how long they’d been in those little baggies though…
Thats ok!! The water only needs to be changed like every couple days, maybe every 24 hours depending on your water in your town (hard, soft, or well)
Fish can be very fun, but a bigger tank and a filtration system and some vegetation is the best!!! Good luck, and have fun!! 
Goldfish bowls aren’t really adequate for the longterm survival of a goldfish (and, yes, goldfish can live for many years with proper care). Please see A Home for Your Goldfish and Robyn’s Goldfish page to learn more about keeping goldfish.
Good luck!
Thanks for the info and the links, guys. Isn’t it peculiar how these fish, won for $2 to appease my kids (we never thought we’d win - aren’t all carnival games rigged?) would turn into such a costly and time-consuming hobby? We already have a Shar-Pei, a miniature dachshund, three cats, a Guniea pig, and a snake. Just what we needed - more critters. I guess if they won’t have the decency to go belly-up we’ll be out buying a tank in the morning.
You can put them in a clean 5-gal plastic pail temporarily… or one of those plastic totes. Give them a bigger container with more surface area and they’ll be fine until you can find a tank or new home for them. Something clean (preferably non-metal) that will hold 5-10gal will do fine, and shouldn’t need extra aeration. Change the water every couple days.
Jesus Phlosphr, that’s terrible advice! jane_says, Please do NOT keep changing the water. You’re killing your fish!
The problem isn’t lack of oxygen. It’s shock. When you buy fish, you want to be careful to make sure the temperature is similar between the old water and the new water. Also, new water has chlorine in it, which isn’t good for the fish. When you change the water, you want to draw the water into an empty bowl, then let it sit several hours before putting the fish in it. Finally, there is good bacteria that grows in a fish tank, and when you change the water this stuff hasn’t had a chance to grow. So you only change the whole tank worth of water if absolutely necessary; you normally only change out say 3/4 of it at a time.
So here’s what you should do:
Nothing for now. Wait until you get the fish home. Then
a) go to a fish store, and get a fish bowl or tank (unless you aready have one) and some stuff for “Ick”. They’ll know what that is.
b) fill the fish bowl with water.
c) put a few drops of the ick stuff in.
d) let the water sit at least a few hours until the temperature is the same as the current place the fish are
e) put the fish in, touching them as little as possible
If we’re talking about small cheap goldfish, a bowl will be fine; the oxygen requirements aren’t super high. But if you want to do this right, buy a small aquarium with a heater and filter. You can get a small one, less than 1 foot high and one foot across with everything for $15. For goldfish, that’s what I’d recommend. If you plan to make this a hobby and get some really nice fish you’ll want a bigger aquarium.
Good luck!
Bill H hit the nail on the head. 24 hours sounds like an awfully short amount of time for all three fish to go belly up. I suspect they may have either gone into shock because of the water temperature or are experiencing a reaction to a chemical residue that was in the bowl before you put the water in, maybe from a detergent or that quick-dry dishwashing fluid that is harmless to humans but could prove toxic to the fish.
Hard or soft water shouldn’t be a problem. My friend has a pond in his back yard that is packed full of healthily propagating fish and the water is as basic as hell. It is so soft I can’t even rinse shampoo from your hair when I take a shower at his house(they have a pump from the pond).
Remember that time we took a shower together at his house? 
I wasn’t talking to you you sicko!
I was aware of the chlorine and temperature thing, Bill, and much appreciate your and everyone else’s help.
Wishbone, you promised you wouldn’t say that on the board. You said it was all in the spirit of water conservation; now I see you’re just a cad. My feelings are hurt, and I’ll never be able to trust you again.
Brace yourself for some hard ugly facts, Jane. But this is, after all, the Straight Dope, so I won’t mince words.
These fish are probably going to die. In order to keep them alive, I confidently predict that you are going to end up dropping close to a hundred dollars to keep them alive in anything like decency. So stop and decide right now if you really wanna trek down to the pet store tomorrow and do that little thing. 
You say you already have a Shar-Pei, a miniature dachshund, three cats, a guinea pig, and a snake. Fishkeeping is totally different from keeping any of these pets, since you not only have to provide food and water, but you also have to provide the basic living environment–an aquarium. The Shar-Pei, the dachshund, and the three cats can all basically share your own living space, while the guinea pig and the snake only need a basic container. But stop for a minute and think about the sheer complexity of what a fish needs. Yes, people do keep fish in tanks, but usually only after a number of false starts, such as the one in which they inherit a fairgrounds goldfish, bring it home, and experiment on it…
And keeping fish in an aquarium is immensely more complicated, because there are just so many more things that can go wrong. Trust me–I’ve been fishkeeping for more years than I care to think about [sigh], and I’ve got a living room full of fish tanks to prove it. :rolleyes:
I know this sounds awfully pessimistic, but I have Been There and Done That. And I got started in this whole fishkeeping thing by trying to keep alive a number of feeder goldfish that I bought to feed to a turtle that I one day decided were too pretty to die. And here I am, with a living room full of fish. I know whereof I speak.
Do the best you can, but don’t break the bank, and don’t make yourself crazy. Trust me, your kids will understand if the fish do die and have to be thrown away. We do not expect much of fairgrounds goldfish. Note–do not flush them down the toilet if they’re still alive. Flushing them down the toilet condemns them to a slow miserable death down the sewers. And no, they won’t survive to live and be happy in the water treatment plant settling ponds, because there’s a screen that catches large objects like fish, which municipal employees clean, the contents of which merely go in the trash.
To dispose of dead fish, just drop them in the kitchen trash. Do not feed them to the Shar-Pei, the miniature dachshund, or the three cats, as they might carry diseases or parasites.
Anyway, if you do decide to do this thing–what Bill said.
And use the Internet, there’s tons of stuff out there on basic fishkeeping.
And yeah, I know you don’t have to spend a lot of money–why, you can get a fish tank for only X number of dollars, and the fish food is only X, and the cute little net is only X, and the filter, why, that’s only X…
Uh-huh. :rolleyes: Believe me, it all adds up, in the most insidious way. Come back and talk to me tomorrow night, see if you haven’t spent a C-note on your fairgrounds goldfish by then.
Duck Duck Goose, I’ve been in the whole hundreds-of-dollars fish frenzy too, so I know exactly what you’re talking about. About 10 years ago I had several tanks and the whole fish-love thing rolling. But you can go low end too. In fact, right now I have only one tank for my 4-year olds amusement. It’s about the size of a gallon of milk. I’ve had it running about a year, and all costs for that year, including tank, filters, heater, fish, replacement fish, more replacement fish, food, chemicals) has been under $40.
You’re totally right though, if you get into it, it grows big-time.
Wow, I bought some feeder goldfish in college once for an art project (don’t ask) and those things were well nigh indestructible. In fact, when I left for winter break, I left them in the tank half hoping they’d be dead on my return and safe me the guilt of flushing them. Instead, I returned three weeks later to a quarter tank full of thick green water and four healthy intact goldfish. They made it through the spring semester just ducky and finally at the end of the year I released them into the local detention pond where, for all I know, they live still and are forty feet long, feeding on drunken co-eds.
I don’t disagree with Phlosphr, in a situation like a goldfish bowl, changing the water often is the lesser of two evils. Goldfish are filthy fish, I usually count one goldfish as equal to 8 regular (non-carp) fish in dirtiness. The amount of ammonia that can accumlate in a small bowl in 24 hours is enough to be toxic. Add in the lack of oxygen, and it’s easy to see why keeping them in a bowl is not recommended. Letting the water sit for 24 hours will not necessarily remove all of the chlorine, so I would buy drops as well, though not for Ich. Rather than treating them for parasites, I’d use something to remove chlorine and replace the natural slime coat of the fish. Aloe vera is in many water conditioners and serves that purpose.
A larger tank would be able to contain enough “good” bacteria to handle the biological load created by the fish, and the excess water changes would be detrimental, but a bowl is not going to do that. I also go with what Duck Duck Goose noted. The fish will probably die, even if you do everything perfect. Goldfish are tough fish, but even feeder goldfish (Comets) have their limits. Last thing I’ll add, do not use a heater, they prefer cooler temperatures.
A couple months back I set up a backyard pond at my wife’s insistance and 3 weeks later it was full of wriggling mosquito larvae. So I went to the local pet store and bought a dozen feeder goldfish. The next day half of them were dead and the pond still full of larvae. I’ve heard that goldfish will die from being over-fed, So I bought 3 dozen more. Overnight there were no more mosquito larvae. But everytime I added more water to the pond, I get an algal bloom. So I bought a plecostomus.
Fast forward 3 months, and I’ve probably spent over $200.00 on the pond. I have gravel, a filter, a fountain, 2 pumps, a bubbler stone, 3 water hyacinths, several bunches of parrot feather (an aquatic plant), 2 small koi, 3 apple snails (they make love for 2 weeks at a time), several plecos, 5 Chinese algae eaters, a tadpole (species unknown)and every week I buy another dozen feeder goldfish to replace those that die or are eaten by the garter snakes.
And the pond isn’t deep enough for any of these fish to hybernate over the winter, So around the end of September I’ll be buying a tank and netting the fish to bring them over the winter.
If cost is the top proirity, I’d feed the fish to the snake.
As you all might have imagined, the goldfish have gone to the big pond in the sky. Log story short, I attempted to take the aquarium vs. fishbowl advice. I bought fish food on the way home, and yesterday morning we went out and bought a tank, gravel, plants, dechlorinator, etc. Unfortunately, our four-year-old had decided to “feed the fish” (unbeknownst to us) before we left. She had dumped half a can of flakes into their makeshift home, ans we came home to a mixing bowl full of muck and three fish doing the sidestroke. Ugh. We used it a “When you do things to the fish without asking Mommy or Daddy, sometimes it can hurt them, even when you’re trying to help” cautionary tale. The worst part is that when we were buying the tank and stuff, we also bought another fish (I have a mental thing about odd numbers ). It’s now living poshly in a deluxe fishy condo built for four. I really can’t believe what we’ve gotten ourselves into here. You guys were exactly right. I should have fileted and grilled them for the cats when we walked in the door.
What a damn mess. And I swear I previewed.
My father-in-law uses a kiddy pool for that purpose (he puts it in his basement and aerates it with the fountain for the pond.) If this will work for you, it’s much, much cheaper than a large fish tank. They are probably on clearance by now–better hurry! I’ve also heard of people using large Rubbermaid-like tubs. (Do NOT wash them with soap!)
How large of a tank did you get, jane_says? The rule of thumb that I have heard is that you really need ten gallons of water for each small goldfish. He’s probably pretty happy in there :).