This evening, Mrs R and I watched the first third of the 2008 version of Sense & Sensibility. As the Dashwoods are in a coach travelling to Barton Cottage, Margaret is balancing a goldfish bowl on her lap. Which got me thinking.
What would you have fed a goldfish in 1800? For that matter, what’s in goldfish food today?
According to this article, it was often nothing.
But later on, it was realized that they needed to be fed.
I recall my father feeding his aquarium fish in the 1950s on “ant eggs” (actually ant pupae).
Today there is a wide variety of goldfish food, which can contain fish or shrimp meal, dried insects, brine shrimp, spirulina, soybean meal, rice, wheat, corn, etc, etc, etc.
I find it amazing that the average person would think that the fish wouldn’t have to be fed.
After all - fishing must have been a common pastime, and you use bait to catch them. And, I would think that most children had experienced throwing bread into ponds to attract fish.
Well, in a outdoor pond, with plants etc- you probably dont have to feed goldfish. I found a old pond at a abandoned farm that still have goldfish, and very large ones also. Insects, aquatic life, etc.
In Disneyland, there is a pond that is a remnant of the old Mine Train ride, and there are large goldfish and turtles in there, and AFAIK, not fed.
This was 1800, before Pasteur and germ theory, and people still believed in spontaneous generation of life. The idea that goldfish could live off the mysterious microscopic life that existed in water would not seem as outrageous to them as germ theory and evolution eventually would to many.
Goldfish are domesticated carp, and omnivores. They can probably find food almost anywhere, except of course in a small glass bowl indoors.
Given a large enough container (say, a rain barrel or horse trough) goldfish survive just fine without feeding; pond scum will suffice. If Margaret hadn’t been changing the water so often, as advised by the goldfish hawkers, a healthy coat of algae inside the bowl could will have sustained her pet for quite some time.
On a related note, I just read a comment from a USO volunteer that the GIs given the job of maintaining Saddam’s palaces during the US occupation of Iraq, decided the best fare for the huge koi in the ponds was Cocoa Puffs.
Thank you all for your responses. Colibri’s was a bit shocking for me.
Victorian-era pet keeping tended to be odd.
"Like ravens, jackdaws could be taught to do tricks and learn words, but as the reverend points out, this did have its limits: “Jackdaws are very easily tamed, and become very talkative after their fashion. Their vocabulary is, however, limited, and is mostly restricted to the word ‘Jack,’ which is uttered on every imaginable occasion.”
Badgers were evidently commonplace pets, reared on dog food (I was just re-reading Conan Doyle’s “The Sign of the Four”, and the man who supplied Holmes with Toby the tracking dog kept a badger, which tried to nip Watson - as well as a “slowworm” (legless lizard) which was useful in keeping the beetles down).
We inherited a sizable pond with our new home, and it contains numerous overgrown koi and their descendants, who are doing well on a diet of whatever they find in there.
I surprised me too, actually. I figured they would have fed them on crumpets and treacle. 