I recently joined the Discovery Channel’s message boards to propose a myth to be busted.
A goldfish can survive a day in blood instead of water.
The first reply to that post was that I just made it up. But I first heard it in grade school.
Anybody else hear of this myth?
Never heard it, but if it might result in the death of an animal, the Mythbusters are unlikely to test it.
And why a day? Why not forever?
I dunno about you, but after a day, my blood ain’t fit for swimming in. (Insert sadly absent vomiting smiley here -> )
It just sounds completely made up to me. Under what circumstances would one leave a goldfish to survive in blood? How would that amount of blood be readily available, let alone disposable as a viable option in which to keep a fish?
I gotta be honest, I’ve never heard of it and I don’t care to see that myth busted. Stick to shooting thawed chickens from cannons into cockpit windows, says I.
Never heard it, and it wouldn’t be at all interesting to watch get busted.
Supposedly, blood has the same proportion of salt to water as…well…seawater.
But goldfish are freshwater fish.
But the myth I heard was for goldfish.
Yes, or at least something very similar; Unfortunately I’m not much help because I don’t remember any details - it’s just a vague sense of “I’ve heard that before.”
Never heard that before.
Only if it’s a VAMPIRE goldfish. Like those vampire peacocks. Otherwise, as noted above, the blood itself isn’t very good after even a portion of a day – it clots and thickens.
Clotted Blood Fish Pudding an English Lord’s Advent treat.
The only possible way to get this on the air is to work an explosion into it somewhere.
No, I’ve never heard of it either.
Do you have a cite for that? If that were true, I’d expect seawater to be drinkable.
Which, it’s not.
Rather than assemble a bunch of links, I’ll steal this guy’s answer. It fits the numbers I’m finding elsewhere, but it’s all wrapped up neat-like. According to some guy with letters after his name:
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/Jun2003/1055727415.Ot.r.html
I haven’t heard of it before. I did hear of the one where goldfish grow to the size of their tanks so if you put up pictures that make it feel like it’s in a big tank it will fill it and become tank-shaped.
But that may have been a tall tale.
They killed a slew of goldfish in that “goldfish memory” thing, when they didn’t bother to find out how to actually keep fish alive by cycling a tank.
I haven’t heard of this myth, but there’s the germ of a great country song in there.
She’s got a goldfish in her heart,
I’ll have to try again tomorrow.
There’s no room in there for me,
And that’s the cause of all my sorrow. 
Or make sure Adam gets slightly injured. Though I’d bet even he wouldn’t want to lose that much blood.
And for my $.02, I’ve never heard of this myth either.
I have heard that goldfish can survive in a wider range of water types than most fish, including more extreme temperatures, pollution, and salinity. It might have originated with something like “A goldfish can survive in water with 1% salt… That’s saltier than blood”.
I just can’t get past the logic.
***If we dont get some water this fish is gonna DIE!!! *
Does anyone have any water???
** (Man steps forward, and begins to roll up his sleeve.) **
No, but you can take my blood.**
My WAG of the logic behind this screwy idea was that blood carries oxygen, giving the fish something to breathe. But since the nearly all of the oxygen in blood is bound to hemoglobin and not in free solution, I would expect a fish immersed in blood to suffocate pretty quickly.