Feeding Time!

Fish are so greedy when it comes to feeding time. Seriously. You'd think they were half starved or something, the way they scramble and nudge for a few flakes. I suppose it's one of the evolutionary traits. If you're not aggressive enough, you starve, and then you die.

It's rare that fish starve to death in an aquarium setting. (Unless the owner is very neglectful and cruel) Usually it's just the opposite: people overfeed. I for one, am probably an occasional overfeeder. Can't help it. Whenever I pass by the fish tank, all my fish crowd around and look at me yearningly, almost like Oliver Twist asking for a little more gruel....Except of course all my fish are spoiled silly and are fat as pigs.

Most people say feed as much as the fish will consume in 1-5 minutes. I can never keep track of the time when I feed my little greedy friends. Sometimes it takes 2 minutes, sometimes it takes 1/2 an hour. I don't like the idea of feeding as much as they'll eat in a few minutes. Sometimes one fish will always go hungry because it didn't realize it was feeding time. (I feed at random times in the day. It feels more natural this way) I usually feed them until I notice that all of them have nice, round bellies. Not "pregnant-looking", stuffed bellies, but just nice and round looking. Trust me, you can tell. You can also tell if their stomachs are empty and they're hungry because it looks almost "bony".



So I sprinkle flakes or worms or shrimp a tiny bit at a time, focusing on the "slow ones" who aren't as aggressive in stealing food. All my guppies are ferocious eaters, stealing food from everyone else. My Platys on the other hand are very laid back, and will swim away if there's too much commotion surrounding the food. The cory catfish are most shy of all. They rarely even get to find their sinking shrimp pellets because their other tank mates stole them all! Even my 2 Ghost shrimp are more aggressive than the little cory cats.

The ghost shrimp "lunge" for my finger and latches on. Sometimes when I'm cleaning the tank, I have to actually shake my hand really hard to flick them off!! These two shrimp are massive (IMO), about 1.5 inches long...

I feed my omnivorous fish (guppies, platy, catfish, oto catfish) fresh veggies 1-2x a week. They LOVE Romaine lettuce and zucchini. I will try spinach, cucumbers and carrots sometime soon too. I've even heard some people feed them broccoli stems...though that seems too exotic for me. I'd rather give them fresh veggies than algae wafers. I'm not sure why.

My Oto cat does a great job of cleaning algae off my tank. I see him sucking on every possible surface in the tank: heater, filter, leaves, roots, stems, rocks, decorations, caves, gravel...He's absolutely adorable!! I do worry that he isn't eating enough though. He seems healthy but he doesn't have a pot-belly yet. He also won't even touch algae wafers....

Usually I just crush the tropical flakes up and sprinkle the fine pieces just under the water surface. If it's just on top of the surface, sometimes my fish can't find them. If it's too low, they won't see it. Plus, if the flake is too big, it kinda clumps together and sinks really fast. So fine, crushed flakes.

Bloodworms and brine shrimp: I dissolve 1/2 a cube in tank water and feed the worms individually to my fish using the round end of a toothpick. To feed my frogs, I net them into a "feeding bucket" and just saturate the entire tank with food. Else, they won't find it because again, they are pretty dumb and only hunt by sense of smell.

All my fish go absolutely BONKERS for bloodworms, especially my Betta. He will literally steal all the bloodworms he can find, even if it means his stomach is about to explode. I read that fish will eat until their stomachs explode...I believe it! Once, I dunked a gigantic load of bloodworms into the tank and before the neon tetras could even eat one or two, my betta had already gobbled down like thirty of them!

Bloodworms make your fish fat!

I would never dump an entire cube of bloodworms into the tank and just let them all "feast".

It would cause WAY too much "pollution". Uneaten food would make the tank terribly gross and messy. Besides, I like to control how much each fish eats, so the greedyguts don't overdo it.

In the next month, I'd like to try feeding my fish some frozen daphnia, white worms and black worms.

Catfish pellets. They are not fun to feed. They are VERY MESSY and chunks get ripped apart and spread everywhere. My poor catfish barely ever get to nibble the pellets before someone else snatches it away. The fighting over delectable shrimp pellets ends up tearing the soaked pellet into little bits and pieces. Gross.

I will try to feed my catfish after lights out. I hear that works better. But then again, I wouldn't know if the catfish really ate the pellets!?

My fish sure work hard for little morsels. When they learned this morning that I sprinkled some fish flakes onto a corner of the tank for the catfish, they began digging through the gravel (pretending to be catfish!) to peck up a few bits and pieces of flakes! My Betta did the same thing a while back. He would push his mouth into the gravel and rummage around in hopes of finding something. He was a terror when it came to stealing catfish pellets. He would try to swallow the entire thing, eventually spitting it out and slurping it back in again and again until it dissolved....

The thought of uneaten food rotting at the bottom of the tank irks me. That's probably why I'm constantly vacuuming the gravel. Maybe I'm just a little bit of a clean freak. (I vacuum the gravel 3 times a week.) To think, I once read that you could get by not vacuuming for a month!! I don't see how that is possible at all. Even if you fed sparingly, fish still poo a lot!

Speaking of waste...bottom dwelling fish WILL NOT EAT OTHER FISH'S WASTE. They may eat leftover scraps, but they don't eat the actual wastes. You should always feed them properly like the other fish; not let them "fend for themselves". Especially Oto catfish. They can't live off of algae in the tank! (Unless you have an incredibly well planted tank)

By the way, before I forget...buy good quality food. Don't buy dubious looking, cheap packages that have minimal nutrients. Fish need a balanced diet just like you and me. I have Nutrafin fish flakes with added Omega-3 and yeast extract, Hikari bloodworms, Shrimp pellets and brine shrimp.....


There. That ends my food rant.