Goldfish have a pretty long life span, that's for sure! I'm finding that so do several other kinds of fish. We just lost a fish the other day that was, I swear, older than my 6 year old. My husband bought me a 30 gallon aquarium for Christmas in 2000. Our original fish were still around when my son, born late in 2005, was still a baby. Right now we have one fish that we got when our almost 10 year old was just about 20 months old. At one point I was so sick of the aquarium and just wanted to get rid of it so I said no more fish, when the ones we had died that would be it. Several of them are still living. I finally relented and let the kids buy some fish for Valentine's Day because we were down to just a few and I'm not hating on the tank right now. LOL