Animal · China
Goldfish
Carassius auratus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The goldfish is a small orange carp that people in China began breeding more than a thousand years ago, from a plain silvery river fish. It was the first fish ever kept as a pet.
Picture credit: James St. John (CC BY 2.0) · Kateryna Martyniuk (CC BY 4.0) · Ry362 (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the goldfish live?
Home: Slow rivers and ponds, first of all in southern China.
In the wild it lives in these countries: China.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: usually 12–22 cm long, up to about 40 cm. It weighs about 0.2 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
In the rivers of China lives a dull silvery-brown carp, and now and then one is born with a golden mutation. During the Tang dynasty, over a thousand years ago, people started keeping those odd fish in garden ponds instead of eating them, and by the Song dynasty they were breeding them on purpose. Everything since, from fantails to telescope eyes, comes from that one species. A goldfish is not the forgetful creature of the joke: in experiments it learns feeding times, recognises the person who brings the food, and remembers a trained task for months. In a big pond it can reach forty centimetres and live well past twenty years, and escaped goldfish have become a pest in lakes in America and Australia.
Find it on the globe
Goldfish is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Do goldfish really have a three-second memory?
No, that is a joke and not a fact. Goldfish learn feeding times, tell people apart and can remember a trained task for months.
How big can a goldfish get?
In a pond with room to grow it can reach about forty centimetres, far bigger than most people expect. In a small bowl it stays small, but it also stays unhealthy.
Where do goldfish come from?
From southern China, where a silvery river carp sometimes produced golden young. People kept those in garden ponds from the Tang dynasty on, and bred every goldfish variety from them.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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