Can a fresh water sunfish be kept in an aquarium with goldfish?
by Aquaboy on Saturday, March 27th, 2010 | 5 Comments
I have a tank with gold fish at home, i go fishing during the summer quite often, sometimes i catch small sun fish and throw them back , just wondering if i were to keep one and put it in my tank will it survive and will it harm my gold fish..
why imprison a wild fish for your entertainment? get your fish from a pet store, bringing a wild fish home and putting it with your goldies is a bad idea, those wild fish could bring unwanted bacteria and disease to your aquarium and end up causing more bad then good, if your mind is made up and your determined to bring those sunfish home anyways, I would keep them in a tank of there own, goldfish should only be kept with other goldfish, they require a different diet then those sunfish would probably need, long story short, I wouldn’t mix your domesticated goldfish with wild caught sunfish, your asking for trouble, I’m sure I won’t be the only one who thinks this……
if the tank is big enough i would try it, but the gold fish may end up missing one day. as for the guy above me complaing about wild cought fish being wrong to keep, about 75% of the fish you buy in a pet store are wild cought.
Whether they would get along is something you would need to try, since I doubt the answers here have actually tried such a mix. My guess is that in a big enough tank it would work out, but there’s more than just compatibility here, there’s the whole aspect of successfully adjusting a wild fish to an aquarium life.
If you want to try it, and I don’t really recommend it mind you, you should take precautions. You would want to collect as much water as you can with the sunfish and quarantine it alone while you acclimate it to your tap water over a period of time and get it used to prepared foods. Only one sunfish in a tank, as they are territorial. You need a big tank, at least 50 gallons, for a sunfish, and with goldfish I imagine anything less then 75 gallons would be sure trouble eventually.
Gary, most freshwater fish are captive bred.
I kept a wild sunfish with goldfish when I was a kid, and I worked out fine, but with some problems.
When I caught him (with a net) the sunfish was about 1.5 inches long, half the size of the 4 goldfish I already had. He was too small to compete for food, so I had to use a tube to put food right in front of him. (He liked liverwurst and mosquito larvae.) I think he also got chased around a bit.
It wasn’t long before he was the biggest fish in the tank, then he got along with the goldfish peacefully.
Fast forward about 6 years. The goldfish have all died, but the sunfish is still thriving, and now quite big. I put some some new goldfish in with him, and he promptly killed them, so I guess he got his revenge.
He lived for about 8 years.
Don’t put one in. The goldfish like cooler temperatures