# Fish in Water Troughs???



## jaydee (May 10, 2012)

Hardly a nice life for the poor fish nut and since they poo and pee like any other living thing they're going to contaminate the water so no benefit at all.
Try adding a few drops of bleach, the chlorine will help control algae and keep the water clean


----------



## Boo Walker (Jul 25, 2012)

You'll probably end up cleaning the tank more with fish in it. Fish poop stinks and you want your horses to get plenty of water to drink. Plus birds are famous for sitting on the tank edges and eating the fish (plus now you have bird poo in and on your tank.)


----------



## Avna (Jul 11, 2015)

Didn't we just go over this a few months ago?

For what it is worth -- yes, I have done this, but in California where the water doesn't freeze. They lived in there for years without the slightest effort on my part.

My tub was 150 gallons, with a float. I don't recommend doing this with small tanks. If it is deep, nothing is going to catch your fish. If it is shallow, you won't be able to keep fish in there -- overheating, herons, raccoons, etc.

2 goldfish. They eat the mosquito larvae. There is no better way to keep mosquito larvae down, in tanks too big to dump. They were perfectly happy. I never fed them. I netted them out and cleaned the tub once or twice a year. People get hung up on "algae" like it's a bad thing. Unless there's a big algae bloom and then die off (caused by a big nitrogen input, like your horse taking a poop into the tank), algae is completely benign and beneficial. Goldfish eat algae too, by the way.

You can start with clean water but then make sure that 1. it sits for a few days to let any chlorine evaporate, if your water is from a municipal main, 2. that there's a piece of wood or something over part of the top for protection and shade, and 3. that you feed them (koi food) until there's enough of a biological cycle to make that unnecessary.


----------



## LoriF (Apr 3, 2015)

Yes, it would work. But like any other fish tank, it would have to maintained properly like one or you are going to just have dead fish. Another thing is you would have to have quite a large tank to maintain two goldfish which get quite large if they live long enough. This is not even considering that the water in the tank would get way to warm for the fish.
I keep two 120 gal. tanks for my girls in the pasture and the water is almost gone in three or four days. The cruddy little bit that is left gets dumped and I clean the tanks and refill. I am usually dumping about 1/4 of the tank which is not hard. 
I have three koi that live happily in 1700 gallons of water and wouldn't want to put any more in there as far as space wise. And that is with a constant inflow and outflow of water and a biological filtration setup and thriving pond plants.

A catfish or pleco would be out of the question as far as I'm concerned as they get huge, and I mean huge. But, in a horse water trough, they probably wouldn't live long enough to get to their full potential either.


----------



## heather313233 (Aug 28, 2018)

I am in Texas, so we rarely get below freezing. I have a 100 gallon trough. Would you recommend 1 or 2 goldfish?


----------



## QtrBel (May 31, 2012)

300 gallon tank. Never cleaned it out. Water was fine. I have a timer on the water so that it ran every day. The timer was adjusted winter to summer so that the tank level would never drop below 1/3. Only problem was one of my drafts loved to catch the fish and swish them in her mouth before spitting them back in the tank. I'm tempted to try again since my shoulder won't let me dump and brush. Daisy would, I am sure, think they were a gift to her.


----------



## Avna (Jul 11, 2015)

heather313233 said:


> I am in Texas, so we rarely get below freezing. I have a 100 gallon trough. Would you recommend 1 or 2 goldfish?


I always get three because two is company and one always dies or disappears. Same philosophy as I have with chickens.


----------



## SilverMaple (Jun 24, 2017)

Right now there are two fish in our 300-gallon tank. The tank is inside the run-in shed so it doesn't get too slimy with algae, and is drained and cleaned 2-3 times per year (more often if someone poops in it or it's obviously dirty). A neighbor with a stocked pond brought over a couple this spring. Once it starts getting cold this fall or they start making the tank dirtier rather than cleaner, he'll come get them and return them to his deep pond. They were a couple of inches long when they arrived, and are about 6" long now. The horses watch them but don't mind them. The cats think they're fascinating. The fish enjoy having a couple of cement blocks sunk in the tank for them to hide from the cats and the evening sun, and the blocks also keep the cats who fall in trying to catch them from drowning as they can climb up and get out. The tank doesn't seem any cleaner or dirtier than usual, but the idea was for them to eat mosquito larvae and so far, that seems to be working


----------



## farmpony84 (Apr 21, 2008)

I've done goldfish and catfish. I put them in to keep the mosquito larvae down. I had to add water everyday to keep it fresh because I didn't have a pump but they did great for 12 cent goldfish. It was hard though when I wanted to scrub the tub because I had to hand dump the water (with a bucket) to get it low enough to net them into another bucket. Other than that they worked great. It gets really cold here so I bring them in at the end of the summer. I had one that lasted several years. He was huge when he finally croaked on me. I was amazed because the cheap feeder fish just look like guppies when you buy them but he got so big and had the prettiest fins....


----------



## heather313233 (Aug 28, 2018)

Thank you all for the input. I think I'm going to put 2-3 feeder fish in each of my 100 gallon water troughs and see how that works. If it doesn't help after the first round I may try catfish.


----------

