Why Does My Goldfish Go to the Bottom of the Tank to Pick Up Gravel?
November 8, 2011 
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Category: Goldfish Questions and Answers
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The gender, I couldn’t tell you…but the food settles to the bottom, and he is getting the food off the surface of the gravels. It settles down to the bottom. Some of the larger, more aggressive fish in my tank used to get a mouth full of gravels, clean the food off them, and spit the gravels back out.
My son, who was four at the time, decided to name the fish “Hoover” after our vacuum cleaner!
Yep, that is normal goldfish behavior, they scavenge with the best of them. He’s looking for any tasty morsels he may have missed the first time around.
All goldfish do that. They desend from carp and carp are bottom feeders. They like to scan the bottom of the aquarium to move things around with their mouths. That is why most people will recomend gravel for goldfish and koi.
For figuring out the gender, I wish I could tell you but I really don’t know.
Its completely normal for the goldfish to sift through the gravel. They are naturally bottom feeders and are always looking for food. There is always going to be some debris in the substrate of the tank, so the goldfish will be interested in it.
It is very difficult to tell what gender a goldfish is, but males will develop very small shiny white dots on their gill covers during the breedig season expecially. This is usually during spring. It looks a bit similar to white spot disease, but the dots are shiny and only on the gill covers.