Lynn Shaffner, age 15, of Spokane, Washington, for her question:

Is it true that goldfish are small carp?

It is true that goldfish belong to the carp family and that usually they remain rather small. The carp, as a group, are very durable fishes that often live to a great age. The goldfish members of the family are selected oddities that live as pampered pets. However, aquarium goldfish can survive even when dumped into local streams.

Carps are muddy colored fishes of muddy colored freshwater streams. If by chance they find themselves in a stream of clean, clear water, they promptly root around the bottom and stir up a murky mess. This does not remind us of a glamorous little goldfish, swimming daintily in her sparkling clean glass bowl.

Besides, the grubby old carp has a short moustache of four barbels or feelers. Glamorous Coldie has no such barbels. Nevertheless, the carp and the goldfish are members of the same Cypriniformes Order  ¬and both belong in the smaller family Cyprinidae. They are carp cousins.

The goldfish story began in China, about 1,000 years ago. There it was the custom to keep more or less domesticated carp in ponds. Though rather bony, the carps are a fine food fish    when the cook knows just how to serve them. It seems that the Chinese carp keepers noticed that some of their murky fishes had lively patches of red or yellow.

These oddities were worth admiring and to make them more visible they were separated and kept in clay pots or special ponds. This gave the carp with slight color tendencies a chance to breed    which produced offspring with greater color tendencies. After generations of this selective breeding, strains of completely gold and red gold carp appeared.

These were the world's first goldfish, the result of teamwork between nature, who created the carps, and the patient Chinese, whom concentrated the carp's secret color making tendency to breed a new strain. Visitors from afar came to admire them.

In the 1500s, some Chinese goldfish were taken to Japan. There the fish breeders developed a multitude of fancier strains with bulging eyes and trailing fins, plus a new range of colors. In the 1700s, plain and fancy goldfish were popular in Europe. As far as we know, the first goldfish shipment to reach North America arrived about 1850.

Without a doubt, the goldfish remains near the top of the list of glamorous and trouble free pets. But the old problem persists. When the little beauties escape to our streams, they quickly revert to mud¬ grubbing carp, messing up the water and reducing the food supplies of our native freshwater fishes. What's more, they soon lose their golden beauty. For in the wild, goldfish offspring revert to the muddy colors of their ancestors.