What is the best fish food for your pets or for tropical saltwater fish displays? Everyone has a different opinion about this. But some choose fish food solely by what the pet store tells them. This really limits you and your fish. If you’re looking for a big, healthy, creative, and extraordinarily happy fish, go one step above what your fish boy tells you.
You first have to determine the purpose of your fish, the reason for buying or acquiring them in other ways, and then after determining your purpose, you can then figure out the right food for them. Do you want normal small fish swimming in the aquarium, run of the mill fish? Or do you want precious fish, fish that look just a little bigger, fish that are just a little happier? Do you want to see your fish run to the top of the tank to get their old dried food or do you want them to eat more as they would in nature, in the wild, by foraging for their food, and getting that exercise that fishing gives them?
If you want more natural nutrition, then go for it, live food. The next step below is frozen foods that were previously live and last but not least, dried food or flaky food that comes in those round cylinders.
Here are some things to consider when buying fish food:
1. Are fish bottom feeders or top feeders? Bottom feeders may enjoy food that will either sink to the bottom or float, either way. Buy some live Tubifex worms. The pet store guy will put it in the fridge there. It looks like a messy reddish ball of tiny nematodes. They smell awful but I gather fish love this. If you drop a small ball in the tank, your fish will scurry to get it right away.
2. If you have saltwater or tropical fish, you may want to try brine shrimp as their meal. Of course, you can complement any fish meals with dried or flaked foods as well.
You can buy brand name or no frills food and your fish will live too. So how do I know this? I was raising some feeder fish once, and I ran out of fish food. So I crushed some Cheerios between my fingers and fed this food to the fish. They loved it, and thrived on it, so i never went back to using my regular fish food. These fish have grown large, from very small fish to feed on. So my Cheerios were a hit. Do not attempt anything I write about as this was my own experience and I cannot guarantee that it will work for you or your particular type of fish. If you are going to test this out, you may start with your regular fish food and supplement with Cheerios. This is just an idea, not a suggestion or guideline. good luck!
If you have a fish that has a good potential to grow larger and you want a big fish, you can start feeding that fish tubifex and switch to real earthworms when the fish get older. You can have one astronaut oscellatus in your tank, which you bought when it was about half an inch long, and by properly feeding and raising this fish, you can grow this same fish to be a foot or two. An amazing growth of an amazing fish. We had such and fed him huge earthworms. The original fish cost us less than $2 and has grown into quite the beast.
Remember when you buy fish, sometimes you won’t pay anything for the fish itself. What brings the real cost to the fish farming hobby are the feeding, housing, water filtration, and decorative aspects of the fish display and aquarium. Hope this article helped you. Read my other articles that will be published in the near future on fish food, feeding the fish, keeping guppies, and more specific articles on specific fish and fish-related hobbies. The author has raised fish in the past, and has experience raising and caring for many different types of animals throughout her life years. Any and all questions, comments and feedback are greatly appreciated.
I write from my heart on many topics, and the experience I write about is from life. If you read any articles about pets here on my web page, most of the time I have owned, bred or viewed other people’s pets.