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“Signs that Something is Wrong in your Aquarium”


OceanTruth
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I saw the new educational video from Aquarium Co-Op and it raised a couple of questions for me.

Recently, I’ve actually been thinking about fish food storage and how long it will stay good for. In the video, Cory says ideally you should run through a package of food in a month. I don’t have enough tanks or fish to use any small package of food that quickly. I usually portion what I can use for a few weeks and store the rest in the freezer. However, I recently read somewhere that freezing flakes (they didn’t mention pellets) greatly reduces it’s nutritional value. I haven’t noticed any problems freezing food, but is there a better solution? Should I just throw out the remaining food every couple of months? Frozen foods last a long while in freezer. Should I switch to an all frozen food diet?

Cory also mentions that test strips don’t test for all parameters, so even if you’re testing every week there could still be problems. I haven’t thought about that before, but again, what’s the solution? Are there other tests I should be running?

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Over time anything will lose nutritional value in the freezer. However a few months should be okay. As for testing, Cory I think was trying to talk about how people never test for other parameters if things go wrong. People don’t really understand PH, Alkalinity, and GH sometimes. 

Edited by Sun.singh1991
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Freezing as I understand it reduces the carbohydrate content in food. It changes starch in things to resistant starch so it's harder to absorb. Look it up it's a really interesting read and the effect is staggering. Protein content is unaffected.

The bit about the water is sort of saying don't rely on only what the test strips are saying about your water as they are only testing for 6 things and to remember that we have no way of knowing what bacteria or fungal load as well as the other trace elements we can't check so water changes are still important to stop these building up. (old tank syndrome)

I'd I look at the report from my water authority about the water quality they publish the results online for about 60 different things from minerals to bacterias so yes lots of things can be in our tanks and the longer the water is in there kinda the less we know what's going on with it.

 

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Learning about the shelf life of prepared foods caused me to switch to primarily repashy & frozen foods. I also figure detritivores (snails, shrimp) could probably eat food a little past it's prime without issue. 

The take away message I got from that video regarding testing was that while we should test, we should also observe our tanks regularly. If something is off that we don't have a test for, hopefully we'll notice & can take action. 

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On 11/19/2022 at 1:04 AM, OceanTruth said:

Cory also mentions that test strips don’t test for all parameters, so even if you’re testing every week there could still be problems.

Here's an example. I recently built a protein skimmer for my outdoor tanks and this is what it's collecting, some kind of dissolved organic compounds:

PXL_20221117_213512699.jpg.f945f0f03bc28338983d4a66348a146f.jpg

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On 11/19/2022 at 11:25 AM, Anjum said:

Learning about the shelf life of prepared foods caused me to switch to primarily repashy & frozen foods. I also figure detritivores (snails, shrimp) could probably eat food a little past it's prime without issue. 

The take away message I got from that video regarding testing was that while we should test, we should also observe our tanks regularly. If something is off that we don't have a test for, hopefully we'll notice & can take action. 


I’ve only started thinking about shelf life again, because I recently received a bottle of expired food off of Amazon. The only reason I don’t feed frozen food that often is because my only local store is Petco and they don’t stock their frozen foods that well. I’m searching for online sellers currently. It will cost more, but I’d rather pay more for foods I can actually safely go through rather than throwing food in the garbage.

I’m also learning about live food cultures. I’m hoping frozen plus live equals happy and healthy fish.

 

On 11/19/2022 at 11:37 AM, modified lung said:

Here's an example. I recently built a protein skimmer for my outdoor tanks and this is what it's collecting, some kind of dissolved organic compounds:


I definitely don’t doubt what Cory was saying. I was just hoping there were other things I could easily test for that would make a difference. I’m always observing my tanks, so hopefully that’s enough for now.

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On 11/19/2022 at 9:09 AM, OceanTruth said:

I’m also learning about live food cultures. I’m hoping frozen plus live equals happy and healthy fish.

Live foods would be the best. I'm also trying to move towards a more complete ecosystem which includes live foods. I admit though, I'm still trying to get over the yuck factor of culturing black worms 🤮😅

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On 11/19/2022 at 1:19 PM, Anjum said:

Live foods would be the best. I'm also trying to move towards a more complete ecosystem which includes live foods. I admit though, I'm still trying to get over the yuck factor of culturing black worms 🤮😅


That would be AMAZING! I’m still in the learning phase and I’m hoping I have a strong stomach for some of the squirmy foods if I go down that route. 😂😂

 

On 11/19/2022 at 2:05 PM, TeeJay said:

If your looking to culture live foods I find grindal worms to be a pretty easy setup and way less smell and "grossness" to them 


I will definitely research them. Thanks for the tip!

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On 11/19/2022 at 9:09 AM, OceanTruth said:

definitely don’t doubt what Cory was saying. I was just hoping there were other things I could easily test for that would make a difference.

Conductivity or TDS (same thing really) is easy and useful in monitoring the buildup of "stuff" in your aquarium. Otherwise pH and KH are the only other things I regularly test for at home. 

On 11/19/2022 at 9:09 AM, OceanTruth said:

I’m always observing my tanks, so hopefully that’s enough for now.

Once you figure out what behaviors look odd, most of the time that's all you really need.

On 11/19/2022 at 10:19 AM, Anjum said:

I admit though, I'm still trying to get over the yuck factor of culturing black worms 🤮😅

Blackworm are kinda gross.

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