How do you vary your fishes nutrition?

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Variety is not a nutrient and not really necessary for fish. Most of the high end pellets are what are considered to be a complete diet which makes feeding a variety pointless.

Think of it like your mixing up 5 different dog foods to feed a dog. Fish food like dog food are formulated to be complete diets so mixing in additional foods really doesn't help anything.

I still do provide some variety though, but not through the use of different pellets. I use carnivore sticks from yourfishstuff.com as a staple and supplement with freeze dried krill. This has proven to be my best combo this far and don't see it changing anytime soon.


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I feed NLS Pellets 1 day, flakes another, different frozen/cube foods 1 day, massivore once a week, these are what I feed I just do them randomly...
 
hoosier_cichlid said:
I feed carnivore pellets, hikari staple, and NLS all to my fish, but what I do is I mix it all together in a large tub and feed all three at the same time. Is this recommended or frowned upon?


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Not really frowned upon.....but the best you can do is , feed them separately. NLS one day , carnivore the other and Hikari later.
But fish nutrition is a little different if looked in detail....it is variety which includes balanced feeding of blood worms , spirulina wafers , meal worms or earthworms.
Fishes also love these variations and keeps them guessing.
 
vinod_uthaiah said:
Not really frowned upon.....but the best you can do is , feed them separately. NLS one day , carnivore the other and Hikari later.
But fish nutrition is a little different if looked in detail....it is variety which includes balanced feeding of blood worms , spirulina wafers , meal worms or earthworms.
Fishes also love these variations and keeps them guessing.
Click to expand...

Do you have proof that its better to feed the variety of foods separately? What does feeding them separate achieve?

How is that list of foods variety? What is in each that can't be gotten through eating a high quality pellet??


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To me the answer to the question, as posed, is:
I don't vary the nutrition of my fish. Other than nutrition at different stages varying slightly, such as fry or young growing juvies benefiting from slightly higher optimal protein levels, or minor differences between certain types of fish, the nutritional needs of fish are consistent. In other words, whatever you feed, your fish need the same nutrients and this doesn't vary, so there's no reason to 'vary fish's nutrition' in that sense.

As far as what some hobbyists theorize is the need to vary their feed in order to accomplish good nutrition, I agree with comments already made. If you're feeding a balanced/quality food in the first place, there's no need to do this.

Do fish get bored eating the same thing consistently? That's debatable-- doubtful imo. I don't think anyone imagines that a whale shark gets bored with eating krill every day or that a tropheus scraping algae/bio-film off rocks in Lake Tanganyika thinks to itself "this is getting boring". I suspect if they're finding enough to eat and whatever it is tastes good to them they're pretty happy, whatever happy means to a fish.

Do fish like to get a good tasting treat from time to time? Heck, yeah from anything I've ever seen. Or some fish seem to respond to certain treats or supplements to encourage them to spawn (example is my wild angelfish seem to spawn more often when I give them freeze dried blood worms).

But as far as needing to be fed different foods for the sake of basic good health, not really, not for the vast majority of fish. (Only possible exception I can think of might be an unusual or rare fish that needs and gets some unusual nutrient in it's specialized wild diet and somehow doesn't get that nutrient from a good commercial fish food.)

But is it frowned upon to feed more than one type of staple food? That becomes a matter of opinion regarding the specific foods you're feeding. For example, I'm not too high on Hikari foods in general and I don't use them anymore (after food testing I did years ago where I had better results from other products). Not that I actually frown upon someone using Hikari foods, just not personally impressed with them.
 
I don't know that I would go with frozen bloodworms, except as a treat. Most that are commercially available are tasty, and are great at getting fish to START eating, but are kind of like having McDonald's when it comes to nutrition. Earthworms are FANTASTIC at providing trace elements and minerals through the soil that's in their guts, and algae wafers (for the fish who will take them) will help provide fiber, iron, and vitamins not normally found in fish meal based staple diets -- plants generally use different amino acids in different proportions than animals do.
 
A lot of very interesting perspectives on feeding fish, I use earthworms quite often as a treat. Just cause I have some left over from cat fishing the night before. But I've seen good results with the way I've fed and it seems to work for me. I'm sure many people have other perspectives and techniques that work for then as well.


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fishman09 said:
Variety is not a nutrient and not really necessary for fish. Most of the high end pellets are what are considered to be a complete diet which makes feeding a variety pointless.

Think of it like your mixing up 5 different dog foods to feed a dog. Fish food like dog food are formulated to be complete diets so mixing in additional foods really doesn't help anything.

I still do provide some variety though, but not through the use of different pellets. I use carnivore sticks from yourfishstuff.com as a staple and supplement with freeze dried krill. This has proven to be my best combo this far and don't see it changing anytime soon.


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To what fish are you feeding the YFS Carnivore Sticks ? My favorite aro and datnoids are only taking massivore and pretty much ignore all other pellets. It may have to do with the softness / texture / taste of the massivore. I don't know. I have been looking for more affordable pellets to feed, so I wonder how well these sticks work for you?
 
fattiger said:
To what fish are you feeding the YFS Carnivore Sticks ? My favorite aro and datnoids are only taking massivore and pretty much ignore all other pellets. It may have to do with the softness / texture / taste of the massivore. I don't know. I have been looking for more affordable pellets to feed, so I wonder how well these sticks work for you?
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Yes I'm using the YFS carnivore sticks and I'm getting awesome results so far. All my fish are as colorful as ever and have hit growth spurts since starting it. Took a bit to get my fish adjusted to it cause it's such a dense pellet but now they crave it like crazy


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