Thinking, I'm sure, that she was being very unique and clever, my sister gave us a goldfish yesterday for Christmas. It came in an urn-shaped bowl, maybe about a gallon, 1/3 full of gravel and with a couple of little plastic plants in it.
It was cute for about 12 seconds, but mostly I'm annoyed because I don't particularly care for fish one way or the other, and now we have to be around three times a day to feed this thing, or get someone to come feed it, and clean out the bowl regularly, blah blah blah. But I was all "fine, whatever. We have a fish now. His name is Gil."
But we just got home from the movies and found him floating on his side on the surface, but still breathing. After panicking and doing an emergency water change with bottled water, we're more calm and he seems to be doing much better. But now we're scouring the internet and everything seems to say that a single goldfish needs something like a 20-gallon tank to really be happy, and we're basically suffocating him in this bowl we were given.
Does anyone have any fish and have any suggestions/thoughts/advice? I feel like his life is in our hands now and we have to do right by him. But at the same time, I'm incredibly pissed that I may have to give up the entirety of our counter space to an enormous tank, as well as spend a bunch of money on creating a setup for a pet we didn't want in the first place....
