Hi I would tend to agree with chas045 .That's what happened to mine except went from 8 to 104 in a little over a year lol. Know there was 104 as it was repaired so all the fish were moved . There may be more now as they tend to be very dark when young so hard to see. Funny story. Friend added some peacock bass to his pool to control GF. They did a bang up job eliminated ALL the GF and now over run with PB lol I'm thinking of adding some tilapia at least if they over populate they are very good eating lol Good luck with the mop trick gary

After several years of using a 90 gal. preformed pond above ground, I took the plunge this year and created a 750 gal. in-ground pond. The two Wal-Mart goldfish I bought last spring stayed in the aquarium all winter and seem to be thriving in their new home. I came home from work one night this week and found that my pumps were not working. While I was trying to figure out the problem I noticed a couple of small black fish about 3/4" long swimming around the edges. After watching for a few days I have now counted at least 6 of the little guys. Wow! Baby goldfish! "Fred" and "Barney" have been busy! My question now is what do I do with the babies? I had planned to purchase a tank heater to keep an air hole in the ice so I could leave the big fish there this winter. Since it is mid-August and only about 6 weeks till first frost and only 8-10 weeks until things get really cold I wonder if the small fry will survive till spring. Do I need to try to catch them and bring them in(and how!??)Or is it best to just leave it up to Mother Nature? The aquarium I have is only about 20 gal, but my BH has already given me much static about spending $200 on an aquarium to keep $10 worth of fish alive so I don't want to have to buy a bigger one. Any advice would be welcome!

We did the same thing a couple of years ago. We lost all but four over the winter. The following spring the four spawned. We had hundreds of babies. We had about 70 that lived and for the past several years this number has been pretty much constant as they live and breed. From experience gold fish are born dark and turn yellow starting about 4 months. They can start breed at some point after that depending on the weather, water temperature, etc. Since you do not know the age of your fish when you purchased them it is possible that they could spawn the first season. The oldler fish may turn white.

You are fortunate you can have tropical's outdoors. I am happy with my goldies and koi (especially since the larger ones were given to us) and happy to have them breeding. I must also say we somehow got bluegill bream in the long end (we have an upper circle with a fountain and waterfall which feeds into the long end and all is creek-fed from springs on our farm. The long end does drain back into the creek in a trickle about four feet long so it would have been impossible for them to swim up that incline. Either birds dropped them or ??. Anyway, they also seem to have now two or three small ones I assume they spawned. The large area of parrots feather in the long end have several babies of some distraction swimming among their fronds, again, I assume baby goldies although it could be a mixture of bream fry and goldfish. Amazing to me! And there are also tons of teensy, bright white dots which I'm wondering whether those are eggs?!