Marine Fish Food

These fishes have extraordinarily long guts and will develop lower-digestive problems if they do not get enough roughage in their diets. These problems are usually followed by a lethal bacterial infection. Almost all other fish will also benefit from some vegetable matter as greens contain folic acid and the carotenes that are needed for the creation of red and yellow pigments. The vegetables in the gelatin food discussed above are adequate for almost all fish, but plecos and mbuna should really have some additional plant foods as well. Easiest to provide are slices of par-boiled young zucchini (par-boiling makes it sink). Romaine lettuce is also useful. Plecos also eat wood. I'm serious. All plecos should be provided with a nice piece of driftwood for them to slowly rasp away at and hide under.

Nowadays all good aquarium stores have freezers with frozen fish foods. These include various mollusks, fish, crustaceans, and aquatic insects. None of them are inexpensive. Most of them you can make yourself with a food processor and a trip to Shun Fat (see above), but frozen adult brine shrimp (discussed below) and blood worms (midge larvae) are more difficult to come by and could be considered for purchase at the pet store.

But first of all, the flake foods. Aquarian, Tetra, and Wardley are all recommended brands. There are some other brands that are pretty good but these three are the most widely available. As a general rule of thumb, if a flake food is for sale in a reputable pet store, it will be pretty good. If you buy it at Walmart however, you are taking your chances. Department store flake foods tend to have a small list of inexpensive ingredients and a lot of white wheat flour filler. One particularly bad brand that you should avoid has a red label and a name that starts with H and is a homonym for your primary circularity organ (hopefully that's sufficiently obscure that they won't sue us for defamation).

The live foods sold by local pet stores include feeder guppies and goldfish (discussed below), live adult brine shrimp (also discussed below), and black worms ( Lumbriculus variegatus ). Black worms are an annelid worm, related to both the earthworm and the tubifex worm (Tubifex tubifex). The tubifex worm is another worm that can be considered along with them since they are essentially identical in their aquarium characteristics.

Both worms are aquatic but are found in very high nutrient bottoms. They are most often found in open sewers and therefore have a correspondingly bad reputation as disease carriers. Commercially sold black worms are however byproducts of the trout hatching industry, and so they are unlikely to give you something nasty like cholera.

Aquarium stores also sell freeze-dried foods. These differ from flake foods in that they usually have only a single animal-ingredient each ( e.g. mosquito larvae, blood worms, tubifex worms etc.) and they are usually in the form of chunks or as individual organisms, rather than flakes. These foods are not in themselves complete diets, but they can be part a well-rounded diet consisting of a good basic flake food, a Spirulina-enriched flake food, and several types of freeze-dried foods.

Almost all of the organisms that are freeze-dried and sold for aquarium use can be found as either living or frozen foods as will be discussed below, but in the freeze-dried form they provide a convenience of storing and feeding that frozen or living foods can not match. Feel free to purchase freeze-dried foods if you are unwilling to devote freezer space to frozen foods or to go through the significant bother of dealing with live foods.

The next thing to know about dried foods is how much to feed. Unless you want your fish to spawn or are raising their babies, don't feed much at all. Fish are cold blooded, and therefore do not require food energy to maintain their body temperatures. They also are neutrally buoyant and so they don't require any energy to stand up. As a result, fish can get by on remarkably little food.

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