Feeding

[RyanU]

Hello everyone. I am looking for some advice on feeding. Everything I read says give the fish a balanced diet of "high quality flake food", vegetables,  frozen blood worms and frozen baby brine shrimp. Questions I have.  

What is considered high quality flake food. What should I be looking for as the ingredients.?

Are the brine shrimp that come dried in a can the same quality as frozen baby brine shrimp?

How often should I feed both flake food and the brine shrimp?

 

TIA

[Fish Folk]

13 minutes ago, RyanU said:

 

Hello everyone. I am looking for some advice on feeding. Everything I read says give the fish a balanced diet of "high quality flake food", vegetables,  frozen blood worms and frozen baby brine shrimp. Questions I have.  

What is considered high quality flake food. What should I be looking for as the ingredients.?

Are the brine shrimp that come dried in a can the same quality as frozen baby brine shrimp?

How often should I feed both flake food and the brine shrimp?

 

Good questions! What I’ll share here is not “the definitive answer” — just a personal perspective. I always learn when other fishkeepers answer too.

We feed flakes, frozen, and live foods to most of our tanks each week. Only a few, for certain reasons, lean more heavily towards one or another.

For flakes, many companies make good flakes. Certain hatcheries order extremely high quality, protein-dense fry foods that you can’t get at a local pet store, and when you can, you have to order in bulk. Join a fish club and start asking around about hatchery grade foods. We have several guys in our club who buy in bulk, and then sell portions out in gallon ziplock bags. But I digress...

For available flakes, we like Omega One Color-enhancing flakes and Omega One Kelp Flakes. Protein is often fish meal (salmon, etc) and of course the Kelp ingredient is unique. Good for fish! The other brand we like is Bug Bites flakes. We get Spirulina flakes, normal tropical flakes, and Color enhancing flakes. One key ingredient in bug bites is black soldier fly larvae. Very good— and different— protein source. One favorite flake that everyone likes is Xtreme krill flakes. You may be able to order that from the Co-Op here. Fish love it, and it doesn’t seem to cloud the water.

We keep dry food in a refrigerator. It somewhat preserves it. For best practice, never let the food get wet. Open, tap food into a prep dish to serve from, close lid, zip up in a 1-gal freezer zip-lock bag with air removed, set inside a tightly lid-fitting storage bin, and place in a cold fridge. Food we’ve kept this way stays fresh for a long time. But honestly... just using a fridge is probably enough of a good step. We feed dry foods at least once a day. 

Frozen foods we like include frozen Spirulina Brine Shrimp, frozen Daphnia, and frozen blood worms. The protein is higher, and fish look better when fed some frozen foods. Hikari makes good frozen products. To prep, we set frozen cubes in a cup of hot tap water to thaw, then feed with a syringe. We feed frozen foods 3-4 times a week.

The best food for most fish is live food. Brine shrimp, daphnia, black worms — these will introduce you to your fish for a first time: they become different. More vibrantly colored, more energetic, more intense. Bear in mind, however, that certain fish do not eat live foods, but maintain largely a plant-based diet. Study your fish... know them well!

I’d  chose frozen foods before dried foods. Dried shrimp might not be that bad... but there’s missing benefits. Live is best. Frozen is next. Dried and flake foods are last — but still can be good!

We feed 2x per day, and mix things up a lot. I rarely feed the same food 2x in a row.

[Brian]

Oh boy... this question could open a can of worms....😂

just kidding I couldn’t resist.

like any food look at ingredients.  Make sure they are of high quality and not fillers.  But at the end of the day the animals must eat it.  I don’t care if it is the best, newest, greatest ever.   If the fish won’t eat it.   What good is it?  
Good Luck