How well do you feed your fish? Next to filtration, most important factor concerning the care of your aquarium is proper feeding. More often than not, aquarist feed their fish one kind of food, usually flakes, once or twice a day and leave it at that. Although a single staple food can provide a good basis for a well rounded diet, you shouldn’t rely solely on it to keep your fish healthy and disease free, its colors good, and the potential for breeding up. Just as you don’t eat only potato chips at every meal, you don’t want to condemn your fish to a diet that is unhealthy and not very exciting.

Remember, it is more beneficial for most groups of fish to receive many small meals a day than to restrict them to only one or two gorgings a day that will be of far less benefit to them nutritionally. In many cases when certain groups of fish are fed many times a day they are far less likely to show extreme aggression problems than if fed only once or twice. Important Fish Proverb: Feed less food more often. You can overfeed the tank, but chances are you’re not going to over feed the fish. Just be sure to exercise good judgment. There are exceptions, one being that large predatory fish can be fed less often. Sometimes only a few times a week will suffice if the right amount of food is offered.

There are three feeding behaviors or groups that all fish fall into. These are: carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores.

Carnivores, put plain and simple, are animals that feed on meat. As far as fish are concerned, meat could include other fish, inverts, plankton, and in some cases, whatever happen by (frogs, snakes, turtles, birds, seals, arms, legs, . . . ). One of the most neglected groups of fishes are the fish eaters, more appropriately referred to as piscivores. All of you have either owned or know someone who owned an oscar. What was it feed? Probably feeders. There are a few things you need to know about feeders: The life of a feeder is a rough one being extremely overcrowded in a tank with poor filtration. They may go for days without food. Most of the time before the shop owner gets them they have already been so mishandled and neglected that their nutritional value has been severely decreased. Not only that, but the risk of introducing disease to your aquarium by placing these fish in your tank (not to mention feeding them to your fish) is a valid concern. Nonetheless, there is a solution. You can quarantine feeders for at least a week before feeding them to condition them with good water quality and regular feeding, and to observe the fish for signs of disease. Still, you shouldn’t rely solely on feeders for your fishes’ diet.

Many fish will gladly accept a wide variety of prepared and frozen foods. These could include flakes, pellets, frozen fish, krill, prawn, etc. For fish that are plankton feeders, flakes and pellets are fine, as are live brine shrimp offered several times a week. One way of making brine shrimp more nutritionally complete is to feed the shrimp spirulina power about half an hour before you offer them to your tank. This will provide your fish with a protein packed live meal they will love.

Some frozen foods that are great for your meat-eating fish include blood worms, plankton, daphnia, and mosquito larvae. I don’t recommend feeding frozen brine shrimp. If you look at the guaranteed analysis, you will find that it is about 99% moisture, which doesn’t leave much room for nutrition. By the way, always examine the guaranteed analysis of frozen food to be certain of the nutritional value. For example, if the moisture content is high (over 95%), this could decrease the amount of nutrition available. This also applies to dry food.

The second groupo of fish are herbivores, fish that feed mostly on plant material. Most plant eating fish are grazers. Throughout the daylight hours they are constantly feeding on vegetable matter. whether it is the leaves of plants, or algae on rocks and driftwood. Knowing this, you should offer several feedings a day of small amounts of food. It is also beneficial to offer herbivores some kind of planktonic food once or twice a week, since they “accidentally” ingest this type of food in the wild as they graze for plant material.

So many times I have heard, “I had an algae eater, but he died!” When I ask the customer what they feed the algae eater, the reply usually goes, “Feed them? Nothing! There was plenty of algae in the tank.” Another Important Fish Proverb: Algae eaters cannot live on algae alone. This is especially true if there are more algae eating fish than algae in the tank. There are many ways of providing variety for these fish. You can feed zucchini, cucumber, lettuce, and spinach for freshwater fish, and live caluerpa (a micro algae) for your saltwater fish. There are also many prepared foods on the market today that are created especially to satisfy the dietary needs of plant eating fish. Ask your retailer for some advice on these foods.

The last group of fish are omnivores. These fish eat a combination of plant and animal material. This group would appropriately include scavengers. When dealing with these fish , you should try to provided the fish with a variety of the aforementioned foods. For scavengers, offer food that sinks to the bottom and is directly targeted to the needs of the fish in question.

By feeding a variety of foods to all of the fish in your tank, you can greatly reduce the chances of disease, help keep colors vibrant, and increase the chances of your fish living a long and productive life.