Basically, how we feed our goldfish is determined by our purpose of keeping. Some people might just want to keep goldfish for relaxation. What they want is their fishes to enjoy a healthy and long life. They do not bother much about pumping up the size of their fishes. For such people, feeding the fishes with staple /maintenance pellets once or twice a day will be sufficient. The fishes might not grow or might grow slowly, but the fishes will enjoy many years of happy life.

Some want to be the best groomer of their fishes. They wanted their fishes to grow in size (and shape) in no time. For these people, their purpose might be achieved by a heavy feeding such as six times a day, or even ten times a day, with growth pellets which contain high fat and high protein contents. Live foods such as tubifex worms, silk worms, might sometimes be used also.

Fish pellets can usually be categorized into three types: maintenance pellets, growth pellets and color enhancer pellets. The maintenance type is used as daily food with sufficient nutrients for the fishes. The growth type is used to foster the fast growth of the fishes. The color enhancer one is used to improve the red color and the shiny scale of the fishes.

As for me, since I am an experimenting with breeding, so my main purpose is to feed the fishes with foods that will induce them to breed. My feeding consists of pellets and live food. I use the wheatgerm-based pellets to induce spawning. The wheatgerm-based pellets can be categorized as maintenance diet type since they do not contain high fat and high protein, but sometimes can be categorized also as growth pellets since they help the fish to grow by optimizing the digestive systems. This quality of improving the digestive systems will improve the productivity of the female fishes. I also use live foods such as frozen bloodworm and live / frozen daphnia since they will induce breeding. Another excellent live food that can induce breeding is the mosquito larvae, but I do not usually use them. Tubifex worm and growth pellets are absolute no for the female parents.

My breeding activity dictates that I must grow the fries also. All good quality goldfish should grow thick backbone early as a foundation for life. Without it, they will have trouble swimming as their age matures. So, when they are young, I give them live daphnia and growth pellets grinded as fine as flour. As they are growing, I introduce frozen bloodworm and growth pellets. I used to use tubifex worms, but for the sake of convenient, I do not use it at present. I continue to give this diet to fishes that need to grow headgrowths such as oranda and ranchu. I employed heavy feeding for them. But for fishes that does not need to grow headgrowth like tosakin or butterfly, I switch to wheatgerm-based pellets only and do not employ heavy feeding to induce the growth of their tail with less feeding. My young fishes eat this diets until the age of roughly four months, where they started to breed. It is too early to breed them at that age, but I do not want to damage their productivity, so I mixed their diets with mainly wheat-germ based pellets. When they are ready to breed, at the age of six months and above, their diets consist of wheatgerm-based pellets and frozen bloodworms. The growth pellets and daphnia are provided once in a while. Only for fishes that I want to grow into big sizes I pump them up with growth pellets and frozen bloodworm.

This is how I feed my foldfishes.