What Is the Difference Between a Tropical Fish and a Goldfish?

The simple answer to that of course, is location. Tropical fish are perceived as colorful, exotic residents of southern climates where it's hot, hence the need to keep their aquariums at relatively high temperatures of 75-80F.

On the other hand, the original goldfish came from the area around Japan and the shores of China. While it's not the far north, it's certainly not the tropics either, and water temperatures are much lower there.

Tropical fish are also seen as unique and rare, no matter how prolific or common they are in the wild, while the goldfish can be equated to the "mutt" of the fish world, like a Heinz 57 puppy is in the dog world.

Goldfish are descendants of one or possibly two, species of carp, a fairly dull, unexciting, and relatively large fish that wasn't good for a lot of anything. At some point in their evolution, they were taken from their natural waters and kept in tanks for the amusement of Asian emperors and nobles.

There is little record of formal breeding of the goldfish before 1000A.D. in China. It would be another 400 years before they were cultivated in Japan, and well into the 1700s before goldfish were seen in Europe. But over that time span, their life and reproduction in captivity, produced smaller and more attractive varieties for ponds and bowls. At that time, the goldfish would have been basically a cold water fish, since they lacked any sort of heating systems for their ponds or containers.

This created a fairly hardy species that lived in more stringent conditions than tropical fish, and yet were adaptable enough to live comfortably in warmer climates, if that is where they were bred or raised.

As a consequence, today you can often find goldfish kept in tropical fish tanks whose temperature run a comfortable 65-75F.

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