Buying And Selling Of Female Eggs & Male Live Cover Services?

[taylorxbaby]

Are there any places where you can purchase female eggs or even fertilized female eggs with the male and female of your choice?

In the horse industry, you can buy frozen semen, keep it in your fridge, and just put the capsule into your mare to breed her. Or you can pay for a live breeding. Since goldfish breed differently, I'm guessing you would have to purchase the female eggs.

I think this would be really cool for goldfish people to get what they want. Imagine if you bought a really pretty, nice 8"-9" goldfish from some auction, find out it's a male oranda, and then you were able to purchase female eggs of a GORGEOUS oranda female to have babies. I am sure there is some way that the eggs could be prepared for shipping.

I am thinking about making a website for this, as there is not one right now. Anyone on here who would like to participate can let me know!

[gunbunnyj]

I'm not an expert on this but I've had fish breed and now have babies from them so I've dealt with it. From what I've seen, the goldies eggs are pretty delicate. I don't know that they would survive "harvesting and shipping". They also only last maybe a day or two without being fertilized, then they start to grow fungus.

[taylorxbaby]

What if they were to be frozen temporarily?

[gunbunnyj]

I'm not sure. It might be possible. Unfortunately I don't think there'd be much of a market for it though. Most people don't have interest in breeding their fish. Just the big breeders, who probably have their own stock for breeding or prefer to go out and purchase new fish for their breeding. It would be something interesting to research though.

[seheap]

I agree. While it sounds really cool, I just don't think there is a market for it.

Most people are content with paying for a fish they want instead of starting a breeding program.

It's even more complicated with fish than with horses because of all the extra equipment you need. (That said have no idea what is needed for breeding horses.) You can't just put some milt and some eggs together and let them go. You have to do LOTS of work.

I agree that it's something you might want to research on to see if it would even work. (The freezing thing sounds like it might work, but like it also has big potential to not work.)

[taylorxbaby]

Well some people may not mind the manual labor.. If you go on Goldfish Connection, there are $300+ fish that people would die to have their hands on. Breeding to that fish for say, $15, would be a huge reduction. Breeding/egg fees would be only reasonable percentage of the fish's value.

[Chloeheartsfish]

Those are fully-grown, healthy fish though. Even if the price of getting something like 200 eggs is far less than the full-grown fish, there are no guarantees than any of the eggs will produce viable fry, and that those fry will survive.

I think it's a cool idea, and if the price wasn't outrageous, I would totally be one of the people getting a batch of eggs to try my hand at raising them, but most normal people don't have the patience and time to raise fish from egg to adult They barely have the patience to provide the most basic care a goldfish requires

[Sushi13]

Being a horse lover myself...I wish goldfish breeding could be that simple!

[nick11380]

You can artifiallly fertilize goldfish eggs by squeezing the eggs out the female into a bowl or pail and then squeezing the milt out of the male onto the eggs to fertilize them. I know that it's done but I don't know all the details. The eggs need to be fertilized right away or they will die and the fertilized eggs will not survive being mailed.

If you want to buy or sell fish eggs and send them though the mail. You can do it with killifish.

[daryl]

There have been a few people who will sell goldfish eggs. They have to be fertilized nearly as they are expelled from the female - hense the need for a female and male to be present at time of spawning. It is not uncommon at all for a specific male and female or females to be bred - so there is known linage. Nearly as common, a set of males is used for one female.

Eggs can be "traded" - but other than a "shipment" that takes 1 day or less, there is not much success in it. They are not really that delicate, but so many things can affect the quality of the resulting fry. Temperature variations, water parameter changes, water movement, etc. can all have degrimental effects.

The biggest factor is that the fish that you see that are "worth" $400-800 @ are the selected few. To get a specimen fish, the breeder almost guaranteedly goes through many thousand. The saying is, with a GOOD line of closely related fish, you will get one in 100 that is worth putting in a fry growout, one in 100 of those that is worth growing past 1 inch, one in 100 of THOSE that is good enough to sell to a pet shop, one in 100 of THOSE that is worthy of being kept for potential breeding, and one in 100 of THOSE that might be show fish. Even fewer become show winners. If you were to pay for 10000 fry in a spawning you would be lucky to have even one that would grow to emmulate the parents. And that is not even adding in any environmental abberations that occur so easily to spoil the conformation of a small fish.

It simply is not cost effective. Far better to simply buy the fish you want - what you see is what you get. WIth a bit more money and some luck, a lot of time and effort, you can create a line that will give you a few fry that are of the parent's quality. It is challenging and slow - but can be rewarding.

[Anielynn]

I have really missed your posts Daryl. Nice to see them again.