monster fish

[Rusty Sprinkler]

I recently set up a 58 gallon Oceanic tank for angelfish. I want to stock it with 6-8 angels in hopes of getting a breeding pair. These two angels became available today for rehoming and I rushed to pick them up. They were purchased by the owners from a LFS the size of a quarter. They were in a ( i think ) a 30 gallon long, Omega flakes as food and city water. These  are the size of my palm !!!! THIS DRIVES ME CRAZY !!!! Despite my best efforts I can never get fish to grow like this. I have them in a 20 gallon quarantine tank they seem to want to stay in  the corner so I dropped in a plastic plant to give them a little cover.

 

Edited July 11, 2022 by Rusty Sprinkler

[Guppysnail]

To get my fish to grow to their max potential I find feeding less more often works the best. When fry I feed a touch every few hours.  Juveniles 3x a day small amounts. Adults 2x a day small amounts. All the extra feeding does not mean a ton of extra food. It means only a little extra. They seem to be able to use mose of it in smaller amounts more often vs the one large portion.  Also for growth a varied diet I find is key. No one food has everything but several foods cover bases. Live or frozen foods also give great growth and spawning for me. I also include some freeze dried. Hope that helps. 

[gardenman]

Yeah, food is the answer to growth. In the wild, fish are opportunistic feeders and eat whenever they find food. If you keep food readily available, the fish will grow like you can't believe. The lunatic fringe of the koi world rig up auto-feeders with floats to trigger the auto-feeder that the fish can hit to activate the feeder. The fish soon learn this trick and the food bill goes way up as the fish have food on demand, but you get very large and happy fish. In the aquaculture world it's generally accepted that to get the largest fish the fastest, you need to feed them nearly nonstop. On one of Cory's farm tours (I think one of the ones in Israel, but I could be wrong) the feeding team would start at one end of the facility, work their way through to the other end, and then go back and start at the beginning again. The feeding never stopped during daylight hours. It's how you get the biggest fish the fastest. Food is the answer to growth. Tank size isn't as important as food. 

Way, way back (1970s?) I found out a local fish store would be getting in some baby arowanas in about a month. I wanted one. I bought 500 feeder guppies in advance and filled a heavily planted and heavily filtered fifty-gallon tank with them. I treated them and fed them and got them nice and healthy then a month later added the baby arowana. He still had his yolk sac and just swam among the guppies and their fry until his yolk sac was absorbed. Then he started hunting. By the time he started hunting there may have been several thousand guppies including the fry.  He initially targeted just the fry then the bigger feeder fish as he grew. He had unlimited food readily available, and he grew like crazy. He was then switched to small feeder goldfish and had them readily available. In a little over a year, he was 22" long and still growing.

Give a fish nearly unlimited food and they'll grow like mad. Restrict food and you restrict growth. Add small, fast reproducing livebearers (guppies, platies, swordtails) to your angels and they'll grow fast as they pick off the fry. Getting fish to grow large and fast is easy. Just feed them. Now you also need to maintain the water quality and that becomes trickier with heavy feedings but is doable.

[Rusty Sprinkler]

On 7/11/2022 at 10:00 AM, gardenman said:

 

Give a fish nearly unlimited food and they'll grow like mad. Restrict food and you restrict growth. Add small, fast reproducing livebearers (guppies, platies, swordtails) to your angels and they'll grow fast as they pick off the fry. Getting fish to grow large and fast is easy. Just feed them. Now you also need to maintain the water quality and that becomes trickier with heavy feedings but is doable.

Very interesting, And I really like the idea. Thanks !