The ornamental goldfish fish bowl has been the preferred way of display of this pet in the East Asian countries specially in China.
Ornamental fish bowl has also become very popular in the Europe and Americas in the last century. With selective breeding a real wide varieties have come into existence and are being reared throughout the world.
Select smaller sized fantail, if you want to rear goldfish in your ornamental fish bowl.
Do not go in for fancy types like Bubble-eye, Celestial, Dragon-Eye,Moor, Veil tail or Oranda for your bowl as they grow big in size and are very delicate.
It will be better if you can put in a small size air driven gravel filter as goldfish are a bit messy and will churn up the water in the fish container.
First fix the the gravel filter to the filtering bed and fix the air stone and the air tube to the filter unit.
Then cover the filter bed up to one inch thick with gravel and on top of this place a layer of bigger stones.
Go in for finer gravel and large sized stones as the goldfish may pick up stones and may get them stuck in their mouth.
Have the decorations well rooted as they have the tendency to nibble at everything and uproot it.
You can feed the ornamental goldfish with flake or pellet feed.
Occasionally you can treat them with freeze-dried bloodworms or tubifex worms.
Gel diet food also has been found to be excellent food for fantail.
As the digestive system of the fancy types is a bit distorted they get the tendency of bloated stomach and swim-bladder problems.
It has been found that feeding the pet regularly with well cooked pea after removing the shell gives sufficient proteins as well as functions as a laxative.
Feed the pets twice daily and the feed must be just enough to remain for two minutes.
Never over-feed the ornamental pet and one of the family member should monitor it and feed regularly.
Siphon out 20% water and add treated water twice a week.
If the water is appearing murky, change the water more frequently.
Once in a month empty the ornamental goldfish fish bowl, clean and refill. This will be explained in future posts.