Fish Food: Variety, Expiration Dates, and How Much is Enough?

The fish in our care originally came from wild stock. They have evolved for the conditions in these wilderness areas. Many fish are exposed to a variety of nutrient sources such as bugs, crustaceans, phytoplankton, plant material, and even living and dead fish comprise the diets of many wild fish. In an aquarium environment it is wise do first do your research, it is very useful to select foods based upon the feeding habits of the fish in the wild. Studies here can be useful in determining what foods to target and what foods to feed. Next determine how much food is required to not only feed the top water and mid water swimmers but also to satisfy the food requirements of the bottom dwellers. This will mean that you will be feed the fish more then they can immediately consume. What constitutes the right amount of food can be very difficult to determine and as such you need to build in some redundancy into your tanks, include scavengers that can eat up the excess food, break it down, and enough plants to take the waste material and incorporate it into their tissues.

1.) What Fish Do You Have:

• Before you spend a single cent on fish, it is important to target a species and read up on it as much as you can. For the vast majority of fish in the industry, their dietary needs and habits are already known. As such a quick search on the internet can yield very important information. Despite what some fish food makers may want you to believe, there is no one size fits all in this modern day hobby. Some fish are strictly macropredators. The native Elasoma is a good example of a little micropredator that really does demand live food. It is not the only one there are many fish just like this one that will never eat a flake or touch a pellet, they have evolved instincts that don’t call inanimate objects food. These fish require live food and will throughout their days. Some are predators of invertebrates, the pufferfish and the freshwater pipefish are fine examples of invertebrate predators. While some like Tetradon schodenti can be sometimes converted to vibra bytes, most will happily starve themselves waiting for a snail, a clam, or a shrimp to come by. Some fish are ambush predators that shouldn’t be mixed with anything small enough to fit in their mouths. Others don’t care about smaller fish at all and will happily eat whatever is presented to it. Know what fish you have and you will save yourself time, money, and will have a happier experience keeping fish for doing so.

2.) What foods best match my stocking list:

• Again here a little research goes a long way. For the vast majority of fish, studies have shown what they regularly consume in the wild. These studies help guide our choices. Let us say that your fish is a predator and you don’t want to feed live fish, your best bet if it will accept pellets would be pellets made from actual fish. Here Aquarium Co op’s posted ingredient list includes anchovies and fish oils. This should make a fine choice. You could also choose Xtreme’s monster blend which is made of shrimp, krill, and fish. Let what is known in the literature help inform your choices. Also remember that in nature fish don’t just eat one thing. It is in fact common for a fish’s diet to be composed of whatever edible that it can find. I would settle for two foods that can provide some variety. Hikari frozen foods for instance provides a line of adult brine shrimp enriched with spirulina algae. I would add this to the rotation of foods that my predatory fish received simply due to the fact that the spirulina would provide them with nutrients a fish based pellet may not.

3.) How excess food should be kept.

• Most fish foods come in resealable packages. When I purchase food in bulk, I keep the smaller containers of foods that I like and I refill those containers in order to avoid getting moisture into the bag or tub the food comes in. Keeping food sealed also helps keep it away from pests such as weevils and other bugs including roaches that tend to love the foods that we routinely feed our fish. This also helps keep the food from spoiling and oxidizing in the open air.

4.) How much is enough, What is too much:

• How much food you should feed depends upon what you have and how much they can consume in five minutes. Ideally fish should be fed twice a day . It is important to note that fish are also ectotherms. This means that their internal temperature is dictated by their environments. This means they don’t need to constantly burn energy maintaining a constant internal environment as endotherms do. As such they can go an extraordinarily long amount of time without requiring food. In the wild fish in good health can easily go a week without eating. In aquarium conditions well fed fish can easily survive a week without food as well. How much food should be fed is something that can only be determined by examining your fish and their behavior. As a general rule of thumb hobbyists in the past have said that you feed the fish as much as they can consume for five minutes. This is mostly true however where things sometimes go wrong is that people who have community tanks actually routinely under feed the fish and stop feeding when the fish who feed at the top and the middle stop eating. Remember that for bottom dwellers they require just as much food as well in order to thrive. They will also need food to reach them before they can begin feeding so some excess food in a community tank on the ground can be a good thing for tanks with bottom feeders.

5.) The clean-up crew: The janitors of our aquariums:

• It is a great idea to also look into a clean up crews where it is indeed possible. Invertebrates such as ramshorn snails, isopods, and shrimp can shine here providing the very useful service of cleaning up uneaten food and breaking down wastes into forms that can more readily be picked up by plants. Here too some research needs to be done. Some invertebrates can’t be mixed with certain types of fish. Other types of fish can also not be mixed with some invertebrates. Which you have depends a lot on your chosen stocking. The internet can provide you with a very useful resource letting you know if fish are snail or shrimp safe and they can even tell you some potential downfalls to using these organisms. In the case of MTS (malaysian trumpet snails) I recommend that no one actually keep these as they can easily overrun tanks and traditional snail predators often do not eat these very hard shelled snails. Still when you have a predator that will control their population MTS can offer a wide variety of useful services from churning up the soil (preventing harmful gas build up) to consuming excess food and improving water quality.