Baby Goldfish Day Four

The baby goldfish are now four days old.  (I hope you'll excuse the lousy photos.  They are getting faster and harder to photograph.  I end up with a lot of blurry photos.)

The main change in development today is the addition of a white line that extends from the full white belly towards the back.  I think this is the food moving from the belly outwards to the anus.

I suppose this means that the babies are eating and pooping.  There are also more babies swimming about.

 I have been feeding them the green water (which is looking worse each day.  It is sort of grey-green now).  I also experimented with feeding them raw egg yolk today.  I gave them one drop and expected it to disperse in the water.  However, it dropped to the bottom fairly intact.  I had to use a long chopstick to stir and break up the yolk.

The babies did eat the yolk once it was broken up, but it made the water look kind of gross.  I let them eat for about 5-10 minutes and then I removed one cup of water and replaced it with one cup of water from my well-planted tank.  I don't know if this is good enough, but I figured they would have the benefit of some cleaner water plus some organisms and good bacteria from the well-planted tank. 

 Something else I noticed is that the babies all hatched within 1-2 days of each other, but they look very different in terms of development.  Some of them are swimming around with full bellies and the white waste tube.  Some of them are swimming around with just the air bubble in the midsection.  Some of them are small and skinny and they dart about the gravel.

 So it seems like the babies are not the same at all.  Somewhy, I expected them to be like clones or something. 

 I am guessing that some of them are healthier than the others. 

 Or that some of them have birth defects.  I know for sure that some of them died after hatching as I saw a few dead babies after day one.  I read that some are born without a swim bladder so they end up drowning.

As each day goes by, I find an occasional dead baby here and there.  It is very sad and I removed whichever ones I found today.

  Another sad tragedy is that some of the babies were small enough to fit through my filter mesh.  I found a whole bunch of dead babies in the filter area today.  I have since densely packed the suction pipe with floss so that no babies can possibly make it through.  I rescued any live babies I found in the filter area.  Hopefully they will be fine.

This has not been a perfect process, but it has been a good learning experience so far.  I am glad that there are still many babies for me to continue to watch in development.  I hope I will have the chance to see some of them grow up.

Have a great day!