Showing posts with label feeding marine fish. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feeding marine fish. Show all posts

Foods and Feeding of Saltwater Fish


Availability of Foods for Saltwater Fish

Commercial fish foods can consist either of a single ingredient, such as freeze-dried brine shrimp, or a compound of many ingredients, such as most flake foods. The trick to providing a balanced diet for your aquarium is to feed a wide variety of foods, alternating among two or three kinds during the course of a week. If your fish are primarily vegetarian, you will find products made just for them. Supplement these with small amounts of animal protein, frozen brine shrimp, for example. Conversely, if your fish are primarily carnivorous, supplement their diet with small amounts of vegetable matter, such as products containing saltwater algae.

Fish food may be supplied as flakes or as pellets, in freeze-dried form or frozen. Many dealers also stock live foods.



Feeding Marine Fish

Beginning aquarists usually give too much food. This results in an excessive load on the filtration system, since uneaten food simply decays on the bottom of the tank. The notion that fish will eat themselves to death is nonsense, but the pollution in an overfed aquarium can certainly wipe out its inhabitants.

A fish’s stomach approximates the size of its eye. Obviously, it will not take a lot of food to fill it up. One rule of thumb is to feed only as much as will be consumed in ten minutes. You can determine the correct amount for your situation by trial and error. When in doubt, feed less. Fish can go for a surprisingly long time, weeks in many cases, without eating, so the likelihood of starving them is quite small in comparison to the likelihood of polluting the tank with uneaten food.

Most people find twice daily feedings work best with their schedule. If your schedule permits, though, feed a community of smaller fish about five times daily with just a tiny pinch of food at each feeding. Feed about an hour after the lights come on in the morning, and again about an hour before darkness falls. You will need to modify this schedule if you have, for example, large predators like groupers and lion fish. For these, the usual feeding regimen is three or four times a week. On the other hand, vegetarians feed almost continuously. These fish do best when there is plenty of algae growing in the tank to supplement the twice daily feedings.

Be careful not to feed vegetarian fish a diet rich in animal protein, even though they may eat such food greedily. The vegetarian digestive system is not designed to cope with such a diet, and problems will develop. Similarly, fish that need plenty of animal protein will not get enough to eat if kept on a diet better suited to vegetarians.

In the natural environment, of course, diets consist mostly of living foods. Some live foods can be cultured at home, provided you have the time and inclination. Ideally, one would feed only live food, but this is usually impractical at home.

Live Foods from the Aquarium Store for Saltwater Fish

Virtually all aquarium dealers stock feeder goldfish. They are sold by the dozen and keep well for a week or so in a small, aerated container. Ten gallons of water accommodates about one dozen. Instead of a glass tank, you can use a plastic trash can outfitted with an airstone. Goldfish do fine in cold water and can be kept outside year round, as long as the water does not freeze. If you only purchase, let’s say, a dozen a week, change the water between batches of goldfish. Unfortunately, only large, predatory tropical fish will consume them, so feeder goldfish are not for every aquarist.

Types of Saltwater Fish According to Feeding


Choosing foods appropriate for your saltwater or marine fish aquarium should pose little difficulty if you keep a few basic points in mind. Saltwater fish tend to be specialists when it comes to food. Quite a few vegetarians exist, for example. Some of them feed on many types of algae, others need a specific kind. Carnivores can usually be satisfied with a varied diet, but some feed only on specific classes of food, such as crustaceans.

Many predatory saltwater fish need the movement of living prey to stimulate their feeding response, and only learn to eat nonliving foods as a result of the aquarist’s efforts. I have already mentioned that species with strongly specialized feeding requirements, such as coral-eating butterflyfishes, should be avoided altogether. I provide feeding recommendations at various points throughout the book, usually when a given type of fish is first discussed.


  
Feeding Marine Invertebrates
Marine fish grab food and swallow it. Feeding them is straightforward. Invertebrates, on the other hand, provide some special challenges. Invertebrates exhibit a variety of feeding methods, from hunting to straining the surrounding water for particulate food items. As a result, they require captive diets tailored to those methods. Some soft corals, for example, rely entirely on the photosynthesis carried out by their symbiotic algae, and thus need no food at all provided lighting is sufficiently intense. The majority of corals also has symbiotic algae but nevertheless consume small particles of food when it is available. Some invertebrates feed almost continuously, others only at certain times of the day. Let’s consider each feeding strategy you are likely to encounter.

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