CA/SA Cichlid Feeding
- Thread starter Dippiedee
- Start date
Yes I would add a good brand pellet or flake food into the feeding rotation.
Hikari bio-gold is better, with Northfin and New Life Spectrum being much better than Hikari. You can get any of those as some as you finish off the cichlid gold.
I apologize, and I'm rarely ever so blunt, but those two, especially the severum, are WAY overfed and headed for issues if you don't slim them down. I'm just trying to help you save your fish from ill health and a shortened life, if not immediate issues.
Way before any fish of mine looks like that I cut back feeding, at least temporarily. If any of mine did look like that I'd separate them, reduce feed way down, give them time to return to a normal profile and to hopefully be reprogrammed in their habits by the process. At this point they need less, not more of anything, pellets or otherwise. It's not just a case of a fat fish, but when they bulge like that they're taking in much more food than they can digest and process, which can lead to serious issues.
As for female holding eggs? No, they don't (or shouldn't) look like that, not unless they're either overfed or they're having an issue, like impacted or festering eggs causing such bloating.
Nothing wrong with frozen foods in their place, but with few exceptions there's no need for them and if frozen food is turning some of your fish into gluttons it's a problem. Heros species ("severums" at typical lfs) are omnivorous with a liking for fruits and plant material in the wild. Contrary to some opinions, this doesn't mean they need a veggie-heavy diet, but a diet of too much frozen, meaty foods is a bad idea, also-- the exceptions to limiting frozen foods would be if you're making up and freezing a balanced feed formula or buying such a product or if you're trying to acclimate a wild fish or a very picky carnivorous species to aquarium food.
Way before any fish of mine looks like that I cut back feeding, at least temporarily. If any of mine did look like that I'd separate them, reduce feed way down, give them time to return to a normal profile and to hopefully be reprogrammed in their habits by the process. At this point they need less, not more of anything, pellets or otherwise. It's not just a case of a fat fish, but when they bulge like that they're taking in much more food than they can digest and process, which can lead to serious issues.
As for female holding eggs? No, they don't (or shouldn't) look like that, not unless they're either overfed or they're having an issue, like impacted or festering eggs causing such bloating.
Nothing wrong with frozen foods in their place, but with few exceptions there's no need for them and if frozen food is turning some of your fish into gluttons it's a problem. Heros species ("severums" at typical lfs) are omnivorous with a liking for fruits and plant material in the wild. Contrary to some opinions, this doesn't mean they need a veggie-heavy diet, but a diet of too much frozen, meaty foods is a bad idea, also-- the exceptions to limiting frozen foods would be if you're making up and freezing a balanced feed formula or buying such a product or if you're trying to acclimate a wild fish or a very picky carnivorous species to aquarium food.
So I'm looking at the photos again. Notice how the severum looks thin toward the tail? Reasonable-thick head, bulging gut, thin behind the gut. That's a clue something's wrong with metabolism/feed utilization due to over-eating. There's a diminishing returns formula for overfeeding or overfeeding protein where fish metabolism becomes inefficient, fish growth slows, more food passes through as waste, etc. This is well documented in science studies of many species.
I got to agree with this something doesn’t look right to me. I’m new to fish keeping and I’ve had my fish for 10 months and I can honestly say I feed every day at least 2 times a day and for the first months I was doing 3 times a day with all sorts of frozen and quality foods and in all that time they have never had stomachs like that. I fed mine about 1 hour ago and look at the pic now.
