About Me

Please let me introduce myself.

Checking the daphnia cultures in the goldfish fry pools.

Checking the daphnia cultures in the Goldfish fry ponds

Last Updated: 07-15-2023 by Grant Lord.

You may be wondering who I am, and what qualifications I have to start giving you advice about Goldfish.

I am Grant Lord, and I have been keeping and breeding Goldfish for over 55 years. Yes I am one of the grey haired set.

I raised fancy varieties of Goldfish on a commercial Goldfish farm for ten years. I concentrated on the more exotic Goldfish such as Moors, Water Bubble-Eyes and Celestials because there were plenty of others supplying the pet shop market with cheap Comets, Shubunkins and Fantails.

When raising and selling any animal commercially, you have to be able to deal with disease outbreaks on a large scale. Imagine the logistics of having to treat 1000 1 inch (25mm) Goldfish. Treating them in their pond is usually impractical because of the water volume and the medication levels necessary for a cure.

I quickly learnt to avoid disease outbreaks at all cost, and if disease did strike, how to recognize it early.

I am constantly learning new things about Goldfish, even after decades of keeping and breeding them.

I am regularly in contact with senior members of the Bristol Aquarists' Society founded in 1929. In the United Kingdom, Goldfish keeping and breeding has one of the strongest followings in the World, and being able to tap into that rich source of information has proved invaluable.

I still keep and breed Goldfish (as well as a few tropicals such as angels), but purely on a hobby basis. The lessons I learnt breeding Goldfish commercially still apply, even though my setup is now on a much smaller scale.

When I'm not tending my Goldfish, one of my other passions is car rallying. I race a car I built myself using components from GM, Rover and Toyota. The body is my own design made from fiberglass. It's not the fastest thing on four wheels, but it is fast enough to scare me at times!

Cheetah Racing Car

Hiring Aquariums Teaches You a Lot About Maintenance

Hiring fully maintained aquariums to businesses for seven years taught us a lot about aquarium maintenance. Maintaining aquariums that you visit only a couple of times a month is a completely different environment to having an aquarium in your living room that you can observe and maintain on a daily basis.

The aquarium setups had to be built so that the maintenance required every two weeks was minimal. I needed to be in and out of a business within 30 minutes. And that included a 50% water change.

Good Information Is Hard To Find

What motivated me to create this website are the vast quantities of mistaken or dangerous information I keep reading on the Net. I had assumed that by now there was plenty of good information available for anyone who has access to the Internet.

And there is...as long as you can find it.

Even established well respected websites such as Wikipedia aren't immune to bad information. As an example, this page on the Common Goldfish is full of factual errors, which we are slowly working through to correct.

I am trained as an accountant, not an ichthyologist, (fancy name for someone who studies fish). I certainly don’t know all the answers, but I have had enough experience to be able to give the beginner or intermediate Goldfish keeper a few good tips to avoid killing or harming their Goldfish through basic mistakes we have all made.

I also want to impart some knowledge onto those who want to breed their Goldfish. Breeding them is the easy part. Raising fry into high quality show winning adults takes a lot more effort. As someone once said, it takes just as much time, effort, and expense to raise low quality goldfish as it does high quality.

So my advice is to always strive to improve the variety you are breeding, and never, ever crossbreed, unless you are an expert.

Throughout the website you will find tips that I have learned from experiencing a problem first hand. These tips won't be found in any Goldfish manual.

This website is primarily for Goldfish fanciers. If there is any feedback you want to provide that will improve the site, or provide additional information or tips on a topic please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Best regards