# Musho3210's Beginner's Guide to Food



## musho3210

Here is my begginers guide to food

Low quality food is just as bad as feeding nothing
Feeding the same food can be bad
Buying those big food containers are bad since the food loses its nutrition

Ok here are the types of food

Flake food: Very common, almost if not all lfs carry them, even the local grocery store can carry them. It is just food that is rolled into very thin pieces, can be crushed and pulverised to fit your fishes mouth.

Pellet food: Small round or cylinder shaped food, hard so fish arent meant to chew on it. Good things about this food is that since the food isnt chewed up there is very little wasted food

Stick food: Dont need to worry about these, these are used to feed really big pond kois

Freeze dried: Great food for fish although on the pricey side, it is just food (mainly brine shrimp, krill or bloodworms) that are dried which kills the harmful bacteria then frozen to prevent the growth, they do this wierd stuff to it and make it not needing to be kept frozen.

Frozen: The next step to live food, the name is what it is, live food that has been killed and then frozen. This has very good nutrition although the "juice" that it contains can foul up the water a bit

Live food: Well the name is what it is, the most common are brine shrimp and feeder fish

Ok now that you know what food is out there, what to pick

You need a wide variety, using the same food all the time is very bad. For tetras, pick up a small container of flake food, just enough to last you a month or two. A good company is tetramin. Then get a small packet of algae wafers, the smallest packet you can find as you wont be using this much. Then head on over to the freezer section and get some frozen brine shrimp, frozen worm (blood or black, dont get tubifex). If you really want to spoil your fish, get freeze dried instead of flake food, it will be more of a hassle but your fish will love you. Now you have the food you need create a feeding schedule. For me i use a very simple one, i'll give you my one

Sunday: Vege day, either frozen algae or algae wafers
Monday-Friday: Flake food
Saturday: Frozen food

Here are the foods primary ingredients

Brine shrimp: the most common and a very good food for your fish, it is high in nutrients and tastes like chicken, to the fish of course

Bloodworms: A very good treat but should never be the primary meal as they contain lots of little pests that your fish wont like

Spirulna Algae: Great food for herbivores as well as suplementing omnivores, as it is vegetable carnivores dont need this

Blackworms: dont know much about these, similar to bloodworms

Tubifex worms: Fish love them, you wont, they are from muddy swamps that have lots of bacterial and fungus and all this yucky stuff that will make your fish sick

Krill: Often called the color enhancer, guess what, it enhances the color of your fish, good food as long as it isnt the main diet

Color enhancer: A stronger form of the krill, it is mainly chemicals and spirulna to bring out the color of your fish, it is not poisonous but shouldnt be fed as a stable diet

Fish meal: All of the things i said combined into one (flake food is made out of fish meal)

Your flake food should have fish meal, if you are getting freeze dried try to get one that is a nice mix of food, otherwise if you get a meat food you will need to feed more algae wafers to give them vegetables, your frozen food should be brine shrimp and worms.

So, to sum this all up, buy high quality flake food (tetramin) Buy some high quality frozen food (san-fransisco bay) and get some high quality algae wafers (hikari). Hope this wasnt a big mouthful


One thing to get straight, never use feeder fish that you buy from the store at 10 cents, these fish although live are fed very small amounts since there so cheap and are very poorly cared for, they are almost always carrying diseases. The only live fish that is acceptable is fish that you raised yourself. Brine shrimp should be the only live food you feed anyway.


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## Trishfish

Well done.


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## Sleepy

musho3210 said:


> Here is my begginers guide to food
> Frozen: The next step to live food, the name is what it is, live food that has been killed and then frozen. This has very good nutrition although the "juice" that it contains can foul up the water a bit
> 
> Live food: Well the name is what it is, the most common are brine shrimp and feeder fish


In addition to that: 
You never know where it comes from and you never know what was in the tank they were kept in. 
It is highly recommended to flush the food with drinking water and not feed it while it is frozen. 

I would like to add vegetables as well. A peeled piece of cucumber, carrots, fennel, a salad or spinach are very high in nutrition and most fish love it. This is all easly stucked on a toothpick or the usual clip you can buy in stores. 
Keep in mind to choose biological cultivated vegetables. 
All this canÃ‚Â´t stay in the tank forever and has to be taken out after app. 6-8 hours. 

Everything else, gob job, musho !


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## SporadicStaticAddict

This is very good information. I wish I would have read it before I bought tubifex worms (I've been giving them just a little two or three times a week). Other than that I've just been feeding them flake food.

Should I cut back to once a week with the worms or just get rid of them?


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## musho3210

once a week is ok with freeze-dried, frozen maybe 2 times every 3 weeks, with live, just dont feed live.


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## GalaxyGirl

I got food for my fishies today, but should I feed them once a day? They seem to do better once a day, but I dont want to underfeed them.


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## musho3210

GalaxyGirl said:


> I got food for my fishies today, but should I feed them once a day? They seem to do better once a day, but I dont want to underfeed them.


once a day is what i do, and my fish are still chubby


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## musho3210

i also fast my fish once every 2 weeks to give there digestive system a break


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## SporadicStaticAddict

Just a one day fast or a few?


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## musho3210

one day fast


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## hamdogg08

Is fasting really that helpful? To me it just sounds like "yeah, I'm going to stop breathing for a while to give my lungs a break" What are the advantages?


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## musho3210

yes, a fishes digestive system is very different from humans, in the wild the digestive system isnt always working since they arent always fed. In the home aquaria they almost always have food somewhere in there digestive track making it work 24/7. This isnt that good. Imagine lifting weights non stop.... Also if you keep feeding food there is a higher chance of them catching a paracite which isnt good. Not feeding lets there immune system come back to date and protect them. Ive heard people fasting there fish for 1 week per month. I think that is a bit far-fetched so once a week or once every 2 weeks.


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## Zephyr

I threw in some plants that resembled meadow rue the other day for my silver dollars, and they just devoured them. :lol: 

*checked for pesticides, don't worry*


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## musho3210

if you think it is wrong the its ok not to fast for 1 day. you just have to feed a bit less than usual to help steer away from overfeeding


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## fish_4_all

I do disagree with one statement about fish food. Everything I have ever been told and everything I have ever read says that a fish food with less fish meal is the best and if you can find one where fish meal is NOT the first ingredient all the better. Fish meal is ground up fish, bones and all and many contribute the high fish meal content with less fish nutrition because they don't digest it all and with poorer water quality because of the waste being mostly junk.


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