You can also cramp hundreds of them in a 5 gallons and they all look like if they where at the shopping centre. showing their best attributes all the time, to get attention. In a guppy "only" tank. At night you can see them sleep on their two hears like nobody was there... And they always race to the top of the tank every time your finger reaches over it...
And yeah, my father was like that, no heaters, with a cheap bubbler filter, fish flakes only... He still maintained thousands of beautiful guppies in the same tank for more than 20 years without buying one. And nothing could have looked happier than them.
I remember when he started it, he brought 10 females and 5 very different males. And it produced a rainbow of descendent for more than 2 decades... Some where absolutely gorgeous...
All I can do is talk... This was the time of the "Polaroid Cameras" and there's nothing left from it.
But the concept of an happy fish is highly questionable, For me, it's calculated by the absence of perceptible stress. The size of the environment is secondary, but still highly relative to the projected size of an healthy specimen and it's requirement.
Comet Gold fishes lives for 5 to 14 years. If you could keep one more than 5 in a 1 gallon bowl when you where young... You where able to keep everything, pops said... "Peanut" lived 9 years. I received this fish at school in middle of January and protected the little thing from cold in my coat to get home. While I could see other kids trowing theirs like water balloons on the ice, to see what it will do.
But i'll never forget their faces, when the teacher asked how they where doing a week later..
