Common Carp for aquaculture?

  this thread is about common carp, not the "asian" carp. Like silver or bighead and grass carp.

  I can put some of my success and failures together as I have them. Im not going to bother if no one shows interest though.

  i was just curious what folks here thought of carp for aqua culture. In the right conditions its a tasty fish! It ws brought to our country after many fish were fished out or close in the east. farmers would use farm run off into ponds and raise carp. they got a bad rap after going feral, because they acquire a poor taste in the wild.

    world wide it is among the most heavily farmed fish. theres a reason for this. they are easy to breed. They eat just about anything. they are also EXTREMELY efficient at turning their food into their growth. Im growing mine in tanks so far. Im growing a chunk of their food, but will expand that greatly when it warms up. they eat a wider range of things then tilapia. tilapia actually have an equally poor taste in the wild, as they eat mainly detritus, (actually they digest the life OFF of the detritus its interesting how it works) in our country we know mostly farm raised tilapia. carp is actually a superior tasdting fish to tilapia in the right conditions. Its also tolerant of cold water, if you get the right variety it grows faster, and potentially MUCH larger.

    there are some cool set ups in eastern europe that have been there 500 plus years. man made carp ponds. they are very neat. you can trace raising these carp back atleast 4000 years in asia according to some. romans did this also and spread them into europe. tilapia were raised by egyptians.

    it looks like with my tanks, and a few kiddy pools. I can raise a substantial amount of my meat, and its food right in my yard. Level of effort depending on how you move water around. right now I am still partially using some bought feed, but not as the weather warms up. you can fee them lots of scrap stuff to, so it would be a very neat animal in permie set ups.

  i find so far that growing water based plants for the fish to eat much more efficient then growing land based plants, much less capitol in lay as well. plus water based plants grow much more efficiently anyway, and i do need to feed the fish.....

    im also going to try to find a non electric way to keep their tanks from freezing in winter. So any ideas on how to keep 60 gallon drums from freezing in winter would be great.

SILVERSEEDS wrote:
 
    im also going to try to find a non electric way to keep their tanks from freezing in winter. So any ideas on how to keep 60 gallon drums from freezing in winter would be great.

Maybe surround them with large compost heaps?

  im going to try that, but id like something a bit more controllable. Ive played with hot composting since being here. it seems hard to keep the moisture content right. If its to dry that doesnt do a thing, and to wet its just a soggy mess. plus being winter probably harder to regulate.

I can bury them if need be but thats a lot of work and Im not positive of results there either.

a friend told me to bury them and let the sun hit them but not the open sky. I guess you loose heat to the open sky, and gain some by the sun. It seems to easy but I will try it.

I partially buried and surrounded with rocks a small garden pond but it still froze in our unusual cold spell this past winter, about 1 inch of ice on the top.  Everything survived as far as I can tell but this was not much freezing and not for more than a couple of days.  It was open to the sky.

No fish in this pond presently, just plants, frogs, and tadpoles.

How cold does it get there? Im in zone 5-6. freezing a few inches on top wouldnt be ideal but if thats the worst it got, it should be okay.

I'm in Zone 8! 

SilverSeeds,
  Not sure if this is a help..
We are a zone 4-5 in Northwest Montana.We have owned and put in ponds for years.The shallowest water feature we had in ground was 18 inches.The one we have now is 3.5 feet.We very rarely have lost any fish.Even in the 18 inch ponds which now belong to our sons and are pushing 15 years old.
We would get up to 6 inches of ice on the small pond.We had to keep a hole in the ice to let the gases escape.We also checked the water levels when the ice forms and added water when needed.
In the 3500 gallon feature we are running now .The deepest depth 3.5 feet, we allow our falls to circulate through out winter.When we get into the minus zero temps and the wind shill factors.We do get ice almost across the pond up to a couple of inches deep.We have never lost a fish in this system..We are not raising food fish  but have koi and goldfish.
  Personally I would make sure you had some aeration from a small pump and bury them in ground part way perhaps wrap compost around the tops.Fish with out running water tends to taste very muddy to me..LOL, nothing worse then a nice trout caught in a pond system that tastes like a bottom dweller.Means the smoker has to come out to make them usable..

that info does help actually happyhouse, thanks. If your water is that shallow and freezes that deep, i should be good.

  I think with oxygen it all depends how many fish I keep in each tank over winter as I understand it. they need much less in winter but they still need it. one good thing is the water isnt likely to stay frozen for to long for me. but you may be right I may need to oxygenate it as well, which would inhibit the ice.

  Eventually I want a windmill set up for that, but for now its electric.

  Im not worried about muddy taste, with my fishes diet and water conditions this shouldnt be an issue. If it is i will simply do what they do in eastern europe with carp. you keep them in a container of pure water for a few days, this purges their system. thats what the commercial folks (or atleast most) do with tilapia as i understand it. Its also a bottom feeder, and will acquire a poor taste if you let it.

Silverseeds,
Glad it was of help.
I have to admit I have had carp before but did not care for it.., LOl,,I am just not much a fish eater having grown up with parents who fed it to you all the time because it was a free food..So our fish are safe as we use them for stress relief and fertilizer  producers.We also use the water garden to produce foods..
  Fish do go dormant in the winter and their feeds change over as their metabolism slows down.We change ours over to a bran based diet as winter approaches.Our pond is plant based so it has levels of plants to oxygenate and feed during the growth season.You sound like you are prepared for dealing with that.
I wish you good luck with your project,
  Mary

Grass carp will certainly get a muddy taste, as they are bottom feeders.  You are right, 4-5 days in fresh, clean water will flush the muddiness out of them, but they will always taste like carp, no way around that.

I live far from a commercial fish farm and dleivery charges have become out of reach.  I still have a few surviving bluegil and catfish but now rely on goldfish to fertilize my grow beds.  Goldfish are in the carp family and have survivied my outdoor ponds being frozen over completely.  I run an eleltric air pump in the nursery tank ( 150 gal. all young goldfish).  I run a pump to a flood and drain gravel grow bed on the 1000 gal. tank ( contains large goldfish, catfish and bluegil.)  Both tanks are above ground with no insulation, and largely shaded in winter.  I have not lost fish to freeze up but when I notice ice closing up completely I will run a stock tank heater untill a hole is melted.  If you cover the tanks at night and shut off pumping to your growbeds, divert it to a fountain, you will not reduce water temps as severly. 
I am interested in carp.  Will they breed in small ponds?  We have carp in nearby lakes and the Colorado river and they get large.  Are they likely to be severly wounded by fish hooks?  After cleansing in fresh water, how do you perpare them for dining.  Fish chowder is one way, pressure cooking is another, what is your way.

spiritrancho, we had bluegill breeding in our small seasonal creek one year, so I wonder if you isolate the bluegill from the other fish if they would breed in your tank.  They make nests  in fine gravel at the bottom.

John Polk wrote:
Grass carp will certainly get a muddy taste, as they are bottom feeders.  You are right, 4-5 days in fresh, clean water will flush the muddiness out of them, but they will always taste like carp, no way around that.

Carp have won blind taste tests in the states. Its the most eaten freshwater fish world wide to. It was a food for the wealthy in europe for centuries. It is only the states it got a bad rap, and all from things associated from being in the wild.

Just so one one is confused I do mean common carp though.

I guess I will see I havent eaten any yet.

spiritrancho wrote:
I live far from a commercial fish farm and dleivery charges have become out of reach.  I still have a few surviving bluegil and catfish but now rely on goldfish to fertilize my grow beds.  Goldfish are in the carp family and have survivied my outdoor ponds being frozen over completely.  I run an eleltric air pump in the nursery tank ( 150 gal. all young goldfish).  I run a pump to a flood and drain gravel grow bed on the 1000 gal. tank ( contains large goldfish, catfish and bluegil.)  Both tanks are above ground with no insulation, and largely shaded in winter.  I have not lost fish to freeze up but when I notice ice closing up completely I will run a stock tank heater untill a hole is melted.  If you cover the tanks at night and shut off pumping to your growbeds, divert it to a fountain, you will not reduce water temps as severly.   
I am interested in carp.  Will they breed in small ponds?  We have carp in nearby lakes and the Colorado river and they get large.  Are they likely to be severly wounded by fish hooks?  After cleansing in fresh water, how do you perpare them for dining.  Fish chowder is one way, pressure cooking is another, what is your way.

Common carps, not all those other types will have no problem breeding in your pond once they are of size.

I would guess they arent likely to be damaged by fish hooks in the wild as they arent often fished for in the states, I dunno... I bought mine.

mine are "Israeli carp" which are a selection of common carp to raise for food. Its got a better quality meat, its got a better bone structure, and grows faster. Though those in the wild would be fine.

Ive got a bookk from the 1800s on raising them in ponds n such a way so as not to spoil the taste.... I will have to dig it out. it wasnt relevant to me since mine are in tanks.

H Ludi Tyler wrote:
spiritrancho, we had bluegill breeding in our small seasonal creek one year, so I wonder if you isolate the bluegill from the other fish if they would breed in your tank.  They make nests  in fine gravel at the bottom.

yeah bluegill should breed easy enough in ponds and tanks also. catfish can be real tricky in ponds, probably impossible in tanks without hormones and Im not doing that myself. Common carp will have no problem breeding whereever you have them, and its easy to set up to collect their eggs if you want to move them to grow out elsewhere.

fascinting thread.  we have a 4,000 gal. koi pond.  4 ft deep.  and we have koi and some goldfish in it.  they both reproduce better than rabbits.  every couple yrs i have to drain it and dispose of all the younger koi and gold fish.  ive never heard or thought of eating them.  perhaps i will try a couple.

i keep the pump going yr round. it keeps the pump from freezing and keeps a hole in the ice where the water comes outa the waterfall.  never have lost fish. due to freezing.  and a few times the water has had an inch or so of ice on top.

  yeah koi are common carp. they should be tasty if you feed them right and with the type of tank you have. especially if you purge them as I was saying. though koi were selected for color the variety I have was selected for meat quality. It would still work if you wanted it to, or it had to. in fact if you had to (or tasted them and liked them and just wanted to) you could grow multiples of them, then you are now most likely. You can feed them just about anything.

  In coming years i hope to perfect making them taste good. this is an amazing animal to farm. Its much much more efficient then any land based animals for meat production. you could grow them and all their food on most any suburban lot if you wanted....

I would love to get this going, but my problem is power for circulating/air pumps.

What sort of fish density to gallons of water are you guys stocking?  Do you circulate the water through filters, and if so, how many gallons per hour? 

velacreations wrote:
I would love to get this going, but my problem is power for circulating/air pumps.

What sort of fish density to gallons of water are you guys stocking?  Do you circulate the water through filters, and if so, how many gallons per hour? 

thats a massive topic with a ton of answers.

you can stock carp at very high densities. If the water is clean, and theres enough food. If you stock at the higher densities and your water fouls, you can be in trouble fast. Like up to 3 pounds of fish per gallon!!!

I use sponge filters for now. this summer I will be setting up to grow large amount of duckweed in kiddy pools, this will partially clean the water. technically it cleans it enough, but Im going to run it through a sand filter anyway. Im going to get a single high powered solar pump and move the water that way as Im doing other things in the yard.

In this small of containers oxygenating the water even with the plants helping with that will always be an issue, so you might as well add sponge filters to the oxygenation. It will do some biological filtration while oxygenating the water.

If moneys no issue, there are lots of other options for maintaining water quality at higher densities. for me im trying to perfect solid cheaper methods. with carp, even those in colder regions can do this, and if tilapia is an acceptable fish to you tastewise, common carp should be as well, because its actually tastier, and in the wild tilapia acquire the same poor taste carp do.

we gave up on filters for our lil pond.  they didnt do a good job.  ours is in direct hot sunlight in summer months and if the flow is slowed the least bit, alge took over.  so we took advice from a professional pond builder and in our waterfall. we took out all man made filters. and just used small creak rock.  the water runs through it and back out to the pond. 

in all actuallity  im sure it could use  a lil more filtration.  but i was through with putting a ton of money and effort into this pond.  it was all for looks anyway. no practical value.  but now after reading this thread.  i see i may be wrong in that previous assumption

as for the GPM...id have to look at pump. i cant remeber. i havent had the pump disconnected or out of th skimmer in over 3 ys now.

well if you ensure the right algae grows, or alternatively set it up so duckweed can grow without the fish getting to it, it is a GOOD thing. It is a GREAT food for the fish, and if its growing its cleaning up the water.

If is a single celled algae, that just makes the water green, sadly carp wont be able to do much with that, however phyto plankton which they adore can. also tilapia can eat that as well.....

Also a filter feeder like some river clams/mussels would filter out the green water algae.

Green algae is good for the pond and the fish so long as it doesn't go nuts.  If it does, its because you have a lack of plants.

Generally there are 2 things you can do to keep the surface from freezing. 

1 - Air flow via bubbles from a minimum of 1' below the surface will keep the water moving in 1 location thus making it harder to freeze.  This can be even further modified to be used like an under-gravel filter system in one corner to both help with filtration naturally &  increase water flow in a given area & possible direction.

2 - And I never liked this method, but humans do this world wide for ponds and large boats & vessels.  There are floating thermal de-icer's,  that use electricity to increase the temperature around the device to insure that it never freezes. 

Personally, If you have a pond that is deep enough you don't have to worry at all about the freeze.  Carp can handle it, they have for centuries, even in poor conditions such as the original Asian 'sewer' use for carps.

With regards to water flow, you may wish to read up on Vicktor Schauberger (man was ahead of his time like Tesla) and his work with water flow, forestry (wealth of info there), and then secondly about Flowforms.

Mekka Pakanohida wrote:
Green algae is good for the pond and the fish so long as it doesn't go nuts.  If it does, its because you have a lack of plants.

Generally there are 2 things you can do to keep the surface from freezing. 

1 - Air flow via bubbles from a minimum of 1' below the surface will keep the water moving in 1 location thus making it harder to freeze.  This can be even further modified to be used like an under-gravel filter system in one corner to both help with filtration naturally &  increase water flow in a given area & possible direction.

2 - And I never liked this method, but humans do this world wide for ponds and large boats & vessels.  There are floating thermal de-icer's,  that use electricity to increase the temperature around the device to insure that it never freezes. 

Personally, If you have a pond that is deep enough you don't have to worry at all about the freeze.  Carp can handle it, they have for centuries, even in poor conditions such as the original Asian 'sewer' use for carps.

With regards to water flow, you may wish to read up on Vicktor Schauberger (man was ahead of his time like Tesla) and his work with water flow, forestry (wealth of info there), and then secondly about Flowforms.

In my set up all the plants will be edible to my fish. including green water algae, since phyto plankton can eat it, and carp eat them.

I will look into the guy you mentioned. thanks....

your right carp have no issues with the top freezing, but then you get less oxygen exchange. i was hoping not to have to use the oxygenation in the winter, but i guess if I do then i wont have an issue anyway....

my set up is all in 60 gallon tanks, and will expand into some 180 gallon stock tanks as well. So making sure it doesnt freeze seems more pressing. perhaps its not.

In a year or two i will have a windmill manually pumping the oxygen.

I think aquaponic grow beds seem to be the easiest way to filter tanks.  But I like the idea of growing clams/mussels.   

so, what are you currently stocking, what size of filter, and what sort of gallons/hr is your pump?

I am not currently set up with fish, but my plan is to raise bluegill in a tank and try to use a small windmill to circulate water.  Mostly I'm still researching. 

velacreations wrote:
so, what are you currently stocking, what size of filter, and what sort of gallons/hr is your pump?

Me? I just got these going into fall. so far all my fish are indoors in 60 gallon tanks. I started with about 120 carp.  

Ive got them divided between 5 tanks right now. I have no filters exactly, I do have sponge filters though. they dont really do much mechanical filtration, only biological.

my fish are all much larger then when I started, but they will grow much faster outside, especially as i expand their diets. I could feasibly stock them at much higher densities then I have, but since my filter will be living plants, its best as it is until I get them outside. I change part of their water once a week or so.

Once they are outside I will be growing plants to do most of the filtering.  water plants are amazingly efficient, so I should be able to grow more food then my animals will want, just by cleaning their water. the excess can go for chickens or the compost piles.....

you can grow these at extreme densities it just depends how your managing the water.

H Ludi Tyler wrote:
I am not currently set up with fish, but my plan is to raise bluegill in a tank and try to use a small windmill to circulate water.   Mostly I'm still researching.   

bluegill are a good choice atleast for ponds, im not sure youll get to many fish to eat out of tanks with them. but just for reference, they do not grow nearly as fast, they dont grow nearly as large, they arent as efficient at converting food to growth (they eat more per pound of growth) you also cant stock bluegills at nearly the density. theres a reason people have farmed fish for 1000s of years but carp and tilapia are almost always those picked.

bluegill do have a good range of things they will eat, but with carp its anything.  Its an omnivore, and a very accepting one at that. you can also train them to eat right out of your hand. lol

Of course production isnt the only reason to do something, I just thought Id relate the things Ive come across. If my pond plans work out, I will be stocking bluegill with my carp. Probably catfish to. Id love trench fish if I could find them.

you can grow these at extreme densities it just depends how your managing the water.

that goes for most fish, but I am trying to figure out what kind of water management do they require, and if I can reasonably do it with solar power.

velacreations wrote:
that goes for most fish, but I am trying to figure out what kind of water management do they require, and if I can reasonably do it with solar power.

No most fish that doesnt work well at all actually. at least no where close to the densities of carp or tilapia.

Well for filtration it can go anyway you want it to.  if you water a garden, just add water to your fish daily, and take from them for the garden....

If you want there are expensive filters usually using sand or another medium, not sure how much electricity.

you can go my route and use kiddy pools to grow a range of plants to feed them, this will take care of the biological aspect of filtering....

there will be a build up of wastes in the tanks. you can vaccuum the gravel as needed, you can use snails to eat some of it, you can use various types of mechanical filters as well.... It all depends on your preference.... honestly I ignore it  almost entirely. i have snails that dig into my under gravel and ensure its oxygenated, they eat lots of that gunk and keep it oxygenated so anerobic conditions dont take over....

With my kiddy pool set up, Im going to use a single solar pump to move the water, but Im also going to get a manual water pump. so for that aspect I need no electricity. To frther refine the water I will use a sand filter before it goes back to the tanks, again no electricity. although obviously this takes more man power then electric filters. so it all depends on what you want to do.

With this small amount of water, if you have high densities of fish you will need to oxygenate the water. that takes electricity, or you could have it set up manually with wind power, which i intend to do after a few other projects are done.

Im not positive Im answering your specific questions. they are hardy fish, they can stand more polluted water then most. but basically they need clean water. nitrates and amonia (nitrogen) build up in the water. these same things will be taken out by biological filtration(which uses some medium or another as a home to bacteria that change those things) or you can grow plants, as those happen to be the same things plants need to grow.

From my experiments so far, you will be able to grow WAY more plants then your fish will eat, while filtering their water in this way.

if you simply had no electricity, then you could still do it, just wont be able to have as high of densities of fish.  there are 1000 ways to set it up, and i keep finding more animals that serve other roles in the system. Its really neat.

velacreations wrote:
that goes for most fish, but I am trying to figure out what kind of water management do they require, and if I can reasonably do it with solar power.

Have you seen this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDN76_UDzdI

Last stage has fish or can have, something like this is a goal for me someday.  However, I would like to do it with mussels as well.

Mekka Pakanohida wrote:
Have you seen this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDN76_UDzdI

Last stage has fish or can have, something like this is a goal for me someday.  However, I would like to do it with mussels as well.

that is a very neat set up. Im more geared towards producing a lot of fish to eat though. along with growing them lots of plants and phyto plankton to eat. With mainly just moving water around I can grow their food rather well. mine wont be nearly as nice looking but what Im setting up will essentially will be rather similar. although im not sure his set up is getting the full effect of a sand filter as it doesnt appear to be set up that way. with a large enough sand filter you can handle any bio load. They arent to expensive to build either. the bacteria that do that work need an oxygen rich environment, and it would be rather anaerobic in the root zones in his beds, though all those plants Im sure are doing well enough for those little fish. I bet he could benefit by putting the malaysian snail in the rootzones of those plants. but theyd breed like crazy in such a set up, so that might not be good. It takes a huge amount of plants to balance out the water per amount of fish. 

Ive got mussels in mine, but Im probably not going to continue using them. The same things they filter out, the phyto plankton (rotifers, daphnia, moina, and other related little things, super easy to grow) will, and i intend to grow bunches of those to put in all the tanks. fish absolutely love them, and they play interesting roles in the system. I still have some mussels though, so if some aspect of the tank goes to green, I will put them in there.

does anyone happen to know of plants that carp or goldfish, or koi like to eat? Id like to collect as many different ones as possible.

duckweed and fairy moss grow real fast, and they love that those, but Id like to have many more. I had a list going awhile back and was waiting for it to get warmer, but I lost it.

SILVERSEEDS wrote:
bluegill are a good choice atleast for ponds, im not sure youll get to many fish to eat out of tanks with them. but just for reference, they do not grow nearly as fast, they dont grow nearly as large, they arent as efficient at converting food to growth (they eat more per pound of growth) you also cant stock bluegills at nearly the density. theres a reason people have farmed fish for 1000s of years but carp and tilapia are almost always those picked.

I'm not dead set on the bluegills, and am also contemplating channel cats but hesitate because of the difficulty or impossibility  of breeding them in a tank.  The fish farm I'll be getting my stock from only has grass carp and they say they won't breed.

H Ludi Tyler wrote:
I'm not dead set on the bluegills, and am also contemplating channel cats but hesitate because of the difficulty or impossibility  of breeding them in a tank.  The fish farm I'll be getting my stock from only has grass carp and they say they won't breed.

yeah most grass carp are altered so that they are all males. even if you got some that werent, they need moving water to breed. Over in asia where in addition to common carp they raise grass carp, and silver carp bighead and black carp (they form an interesting symbiosis. in a pond culture) they seem to usually collect the eggs in the wild. until recently where some use hormones.

you could go another route depending on how big of a set up. you could get a few bluegills, and maybe some carp,  ... but focus on the catfish. based on the numbers Ive seen catfish are rather efficient in such set ups a bit above bluegills but bluegills were still far ahead of most other things. I should try to find the charts im talking about. then if you cant get a steady supply of catfish fry you can just breed the carp and bluegills.

Theres another angle to raising carp and fish as well actually.

Koi can be sold for a good amount of money when they are larger. even more common varieties that dont have pedigree, can fetch a few hundred bucks sometimes.

a friend of a friends sold 2 of those bottom feeders you get from a pet store, that were rather large for 45 a piece to a pet store.

  Lots of other things as well, its not really my field, but my point being is its a possible money making stream.

 

 

The cats are looking better to me right now.  

H Ludi Tyler wrote:
The cats are looking better to me right now.  

keep your cats away from my fish...    my cats ate two of them actually. it was a problem for awhile there.

We built hoop houses for our chickens years ago. It doesn't freeze in them. This year we built a small (8'x30'?) hoop house for some of our pigs with one layer of plastic and open side and end knee walls. It didn't freeze in there! Amazing. The ground of the greenhouse was covered with a deep pack of bedding and manure that was composting. This produced a lot of heat. The pigs produced a lot of heat. They weren't locked in there, rather this is where they slept. They walked out and about 100' to 150' away to water and food. Yet even though the greenhouse was open and our temperatures got below -15°F the inside of the greenhouse never froze.

I have observed as similar effect with our chickens greenhouses so it wasn't a total surprise but it was nice vindication that we could do it on a larger scale. We are planning to build a much larger set of nested greenhouses. The outer one will be for the large livestock. The inner one will be for delicate plants through the winter, weaner piglets and chickens. I have a spot of about an acre in size that we'll use for this that I flattened a few years ago as a terrace. Around the outer greenhouse will be sacrificial winter outdoor paddocks which will be gardens in the summer.

In the very center of the inner most greenhouse we will have a series of tanks for fish. The tanks themselves add thermal mass.

Much of this we've been doing in little ways for years. Two years ago we built a 30'x70' foundation which we put roofs over and modeled some more of this. Probably in two or three more years we'll be ready to do the big one. The goal is to keep summer going all year round in that inner greenhouse. Our summers get up into the 60's and 70's, occasionally into the 80's. If I could do that year round for our livestock and some plants it would be wonderful because winter is brutal.

Heat:
Animals
Compost
Solar
Geothermal
Wood - cook stove for making weaner meals, boiling eggs, etc produces some heat.

Cheers

-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
Pastured Pigs, Sheep & Kids
in the mountains of Vermont
Read about our on-farm butcher shop project:
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/butchershop
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/csa

SILVERSEEDS wrote:
does anyone happen to know of plants that carp or goldfish, or koi like to eat? Id like to collect as many different ones as possible.

duckweed and fairy moss grow real fast, and they love that those, but Id like to have many more. I had a list going awhile back and was waiting for it to get warmer, but I lost it.

Honestly, both love to eat all kinds of plants.  Goldfish are notorious for eating up well established planted aquariums.