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What’s Your Go-To “Basic” Dry Fish Food?


Fish Folk
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We try to feed a reasonably wide variety of live, frozen, and dry fish food. Some days allow for more time-intensive feeding. Other days... it’s “fast-serve-and-go!” So, we have chosen a dry flake food that can be fed to all but the smallest fry in our fishroom. We’ve found the Omega One freshwater flakes to be a decent lower-end flake food for these servings. What’s your go-to basic / generic / works-for-just-about-everyone dry food? 

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Edited by Fish Folk
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My ONE would be Fluval Bug Bites. I don’t know if it’s “better” than any other foods. I just like it because its main ingredient is black soldier fly larvae. Seems like a nice sustainable food for fish. Other foods I will just buy when it runs out, but I always keep a couple of unopened cans of bug bites in the freezer so its always on hand.

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Tetramin Plus is my staple food. It's been around forever and my fish do well with it. I can get seven ounces for less than $8, so it's very affordable. My fish get frozen blood worms, shrimp pellets, freeze-dried tubifex worms, and other stuff besides, but as a basic, off the shelf food, the Tetramin Plus works for me. I don't always get it through Amazon, but I've bought the seven ounce containers through them 13 times according to Amazon, so I use a fair amount of it. I've also bought it locally, through Chewy, That Pet Place, and Drs Foster and Smith when they were still around. I've got a new container coming today. It's a good, off-the-shelf, no brainer food for me.

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7 minutes ago, MickS77 said:

Xtreme Nano, every fish I have goes crazy for it. Feeds especially well in a squeeze bottle from Walmart. 

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That is a great reuse of the label! Dean would give that a thumbs up too I’m sure. I’ve tried to reuse labels before, but I must be some kind of elephant. I always end up ripping it somewhere. Lol.

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Hikari micropellets are my main food (I have Bug Bites tropical micropellets to try next), but also flake (Tetra now, something better when that ages out), and once a week everyone gets Bug Bites Spirulina flake and nothing else (the rasboras are never happy about that!) Also various freeze dried and frozen, and live BBS. I also now have Hikari Betta Bio-Gold, but Cosmo isn't quite big enough yet for that yet. He chows on everything so far.

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59 minutes ago, Fish Folk said:

We’ve found the Omega One freshwater flakes to be a decent lower-end flake food for these servings.

Omega One Freshwater Flakes is NOT a lower end food as it's made from fresh whole fish rather than questionable quality fishmeal loaded with preservatives and stored in a warehouse for who knows how long!

I use a mix of Omega One, Tetramin Tropical, and Cobalt or Ocean Nutrition. I also feed some frozen foods like spirulina brine shrimp, mysis shrimp and often live foods like sustainable micro worms, white worms and daphnia that I culture.

For a great article with tons of research on commercial fish foods, check my website/blog.

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I feel like Hikari vibrabites are a good size for most of my mid-sized fish, but all the little ones (guppies) get Fluval Bug bites flakes. I also have Hikari Cichlid Gold for the Acaras. 

None of these are particularly cheap, but I found out I am wicked allergic to some of the ingredients in other food. I am sure they work fine for the fish, but I would like to not die, sooo...I read labels religiously and if there isn't a clear list of ingredients I just assume it is a nope.

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Hikari micro pellets! For no reason other than it’s what someone first handed me at the LFS.

For my bottom feeders it’s API bottom feeder pellets. Again, someone sold it to me when I first got my loaches and now they love it more than any other (dry) food I’ve tried. I’d rather get all my food from the co-op, but I’ve had to make an exception for the loaches. 

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I have serious collectoritis, but minimal extra time for live or frozen foods. I did venture into frozen bloodworms finally, and the fish were very happy! For dry foods I'm rotating among First Bites, Bug Bites, Xtreme Krill Flakes, Vibra Bites, Hikari Micro Pellets, and New Life Spectrum algae wafers. And I have the Coop's fry food in my cart.  I have a whole basket of fish food in my freezer lol. What I'm feeding is in a 7-day pill container since I'm actually only feeding 4 tanks. 😅 

 

I don't tend to be terribly brand-loyal in animal foods. I rotate my dogs and cats among the brands I trust too, just in case any one formula has imbalances that are hopefully counteracted by others. I'm more loyal with horse and chicken feed, but the horses mostly eat hay, and the chickens get to forage too. And chickens probably have some of the best-researched nutrition requirements of any species. Dogs and cats somewhat less so, and the variety of fish species in my tanks even less.

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Since I feed a bit of variation in diet to prevent digestive issues, I can't say I have only one food. If I could only have 2, though, it would be Tetra TetraColor and Xtreme Community Crave, both flake. My current fish aren't wild about anything that sinks immediately (like pellets), though the snails and pleco sure love those. LOL So I have to be careful about feeding pelleted foods and things of that nature.

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