Chopped fish vs pellets and water quality

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I have noticed that my nitrates go up much faster when I feed pellets. It makes sense, because, as it was mentioned earlier, the frozen stuff largely contains water. This means that the fish is getting full, but there is not actually as much nutrition in the food. Which, ultimately, leads to lower nitrates. Seeing as how most of us, me included, feed our fish much more than is necessary, I don't worry about my fish not getting as much nutrients out of the frozen stuff, because I'm confident that they are getting plenty.

A comparison along the same lines was made over on the SimplyDiscus forum sometime last year. They OP wanted to know which food had more nutrition, frozen black worms, or freeze dried black worms. The consensus was that a single frozen black worm will have about the same nutritional content as a single freeze dried black worm. However, being that discus need a very high protein diet during their juvie stage, they like to feed freeze dried so that the fish can eat more of them, instead of filling up on the water filled frozen black worms.

All in all, it seems to me that pellets are more comparable to vitamins where frozen fish/shrimp is more comparable to normal food.

Btw, I still feed pellets to my vulture cats. Otherwise, they would get any food because my eels scarf down everything else, but won't touch the pellets.
 
I have noticed that my nitrates go up much faster when I feed pellets. It makes sense, because, as it was mentioned earlier, the frozen stuff largely contains water. This means that the fish is getting full, but there is not actually as much nutrition in the food. Which, ultimately, leads to lower nitrates. Seeing as how most of us, me included, feed our fish much more than is necessary, I don't worry about my fish not getting as much nutrients out of the frozen stuff, because I'm confident that they are getting plenty.

A comparison along the same lines was made over on the SimplyDiscus forum sometime last year. They OP wanted to know which food had more nutrition, frozen black worms, or freeze dried black worms. The consensus was that a single frozen black worm will have about the same nutritional content as a single freeze dried black worm. However, being that discus need a very high protein diet during their juvie stage, they like to feed freeze dried so that the fish can eat more of them, instead of filling up on the water filled frozen black worms.

All in all, it seems to me that pellets are more comparable to vitamins where frozen fish/shrimp is more comparable to normal food.

Btw, I still feed pellets to my vulture cats. Otherwise, they would get any food because my eels scarf down everything else, but won't touch the pellets.
 
A high quality pellet is very nutrient dense, and will be well balanced in amino acids, fatty acids, minerals, vitamins, etc. Much more than just a vitamin. Fresh fish portions are typically lacking in various nutrients, which is why public aquariums, zoos, etc supplement fresh/frozen with vitamins and minerals. There's really no right or wrong way to feed fish, some things simply work better in different applications.

BTW - almost all species of fish in their juvenile stage, show best overall health & growth on a high protein diet. It's only later in their life stage that some species drift away from that high protein diet. Many fish classified as strict herbivores, start their life out consuming a high protein diet in the wild.
 
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RD. said:
A high quality pellet is very nutrient dense, and will be well balanced in amino acids, fatty acids, minerals, vitamins, etc. Much more than just a vitamin. Fresh fish portions are typically lacking in various nutrients, which is why public aquariums, zoos, etc supplement fresh/frozen with vitamins and minerals. There's really no right or wrong way to feed fish, some things simply work better in different applications.

BTW - almost all species of fish in their juvenile stage, show best overall health & growth on a high protein diet. It's only later in their life stage that some species drift away from that high protein diet. Many fish classified as strict herbivores, start their life out consuming a high protein diet in the wild.
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A while back you educated me on the whole herbivore thing. I made the mistake of over doing the veggies on juvie "herbivorous" cichlids ive since balance it out more wirh higjer protein foods
 
Drstrangelove said:
http://www.jbc.org/content/159/2/373.full.pdf

So this isn't the table, but one can see that individual "base" proteins vary by nitrogen content widely 8-27%.

This would imply that various foods with the same protein %, but that are made up of different proportions of the base proteins, would have different amounts of nitrogen and thus different amounts of ammonia. Ammonia is directly a pre cursor to nitrates.
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Yea!! I found the table I was looking for buried in my 'nitrates' archives. Better late than never. see page 6.

https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/80400525/Data/Classics/cir183.pdf
 
Drstrangelove said:
Yea!! I found the table I was looking for buried in my 'nitrates' archives. Better late than never. see page 6.

https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/80400525/Data/Classics/cir183.pdf
Click to expand...

So would the nitrogen column correspond to the nitrate level in loose terms ? Shrimp would produce slightly less nitrate than almond in simple terms.

I guess for me having little knowledge of nutrition beyond what ive learned from you guys and not being able to weigh 1 tilapia fillet (amount i normally feed) vs the amount of pellets they get on a pellet day i could simply just feed pellets for a week test nitrates and do the same for tilapia. With the understanding that the difference in nitrates isnt based on the food itself but the amount/weight of each food.
 
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