Goldfish are by far the most popular breed of pet fish on the planet and people all over the world are choosing to keep them as pets in the home. Apart from being a great pet, they also offer other great characteristics such as a great ornament for the house. Their look is almost spellbinding and you may notice that when you have a visitor to your home, the first thing they choose to look at is your aquarium full of beautiful goldfish.

But there is one thing that has plagued these wonderful creatures in the past and that is the fact they are severely prone to disease and as a result many owners have found it hard to hang onto their fish for more than a couple of months.

Goldfish are an amazing species of fish and in the past there are records of fish surviving up to 40 years! This is an amazing feat considering the proportionality of their size. So if they have the ability to live for many years, why do so many die at such a young age?

Human's inability to look after anything or anyone but themselves! Now I don't mean to slag off the human race, after all I am a human being myself, but I think it's fair to say that many of the problems involving animals are a direct result of human interaction, am I right? In the wild, goldfish remained untouched and as a result, they came into no contact with any diseases or bacteria that maybe harmful to them.

But once they began to enter the homes of people all around the world, they began to contract diseases such as fin rot, Ick and many others, all a result of a poor environment inside a tank or aquarium.

The Japanese had it right, they chose to keep goldfish in a garden pond, which usually meant no human contact whatsoever and they could live in relative peace. Also a lot of the time their fish survived from eating the natural algae in the ponds, compared to having human hands passing disease ridden flakes of food into their environment.

Now everything I have talked about above moves towards keeping your fish in a pond as a good idea and in an aquarium a bad one, but this is not always the case. I have a lot of faith in an aquariums ability to safely inhabit goldfish, just as long as you take extra care when feeding and changing the water.

Make sure you sterilize your hands before feeding and changing the tank water. The water MUST be changed every week in order to keep a sanitary living space for your fish to live in. If you follow these two golden rules, you're goldfish will stand a fighting chance of survival and hopefully will live for many years to come.