Can you really make a fish more colorful ?

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I think one of the factors in a wild specimens color that's not being considered is Sunlight! I've seen fish come from conkels farm just glowing and after a couple weeks or a month that initial shine fades away. Don't forget that everyone cares for their fish differently even if fed the same foods etc and the fish will still look different than the next guy.


On the other hand I think I smell trolls on this thread!


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Sorry RD had to derail your thread into yet another fish food debate OP but the answer is that there are ways to enhance your fish's coloration that you can control. Again, water parameters/quality, dominance, and finally diet. Most effective bang for your buck food would be Tetra Colorbits and if you want to enhance the greens/blues add some food that contains spirulina.
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This was never about any kind of fish food debate, and the only person attempting to make it into one has been you. The OP asked a fairly specififc question regarding food, and its role in the overall coloration of a fish, and I have attempted to answer that specific question to the best of my ability.

The fact that you equate "color" with quality in a feed, or what's better, or best, or offers the best bang for your buck again shows how little you understand about this subject. A very low quality, low cost, fish food can potentially color up a fish to all of its natural glory, and well beyond. Hence my point in referencing those foods that utilize massive amounts of synthetic color enhancers such as Carophyll Pink, a very low cost ingredient compared to a natural form of astaxanthin derived from micro-algae, such as Cyanotech's Naturose.

Yes, Tetra ColorBits will color up a fish, but if one takes a close look at the raw ingredients it becomes fairly obvious how they do that. I don't think those fancy colors are coming from Soybean Meal ....... Wheat Germ Meal, Wheat Flour ...... Corn Gluten ........ Feeding Oat Meal ......... Potato Protein, or Wheat Gluten. Yet those are some of the main ingredients listed by dry weight that make up the bulk of that formula.

Looks more like a recipe for pancakes, than it does something that someone should be feeding their fish.


Thank you to Ryan et al who have attempted to keep their comments, and this discussion on point.




Please don't feed the trolls, because a few idiots always show up in these types of threads.
 
cichlid_obsessed92 said:
Most foods on the market claim to do so much to improve the color of a fish but does food really play that big of a factor ? I just can't see food being more important to color than water quality, genetics and even the amount And type of light the fish recieves, what are your opinions ?
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True, most products make similar claims, which is exactly one of the reasons why I started doing my own objective testing some years ago-- and did a lot of food testing over the years, both alternately feeding different foods to the same tank, same fish, and side by side testing, where I split individuals from a single spawn into separate side by side tanks and fed them different products while everything else remained identical. Results of my testing? Absolutely nutrition makes a difference and absolutely some products will result in better color than others. (And, yes, imo some products do this with quality overall nutrition and ingredients that naturally include nutrients important for color, while others are not much more than faintly fish flavored crackers supplemented with vitamins and color enhancers, whether natural and/or synthetic.)

The other reason I decided to start seriously testing different foods against one another is because of having a beautiful group of Copadichromis mloto that seemed to lose their luster at times-- which I realized after a while depended on which product I was feeding them. This was ten years ago, and why, after years of already successful fish keeping and breeding, I started doing some serious testing of fish foods and also became interested in reading more on the science of subject.

I've seen people miss the boat on this in various ways. One way is to think fish color starts and ends with food. Wrong. Nutrition is a key, but part of a bigger picture that includes overall health, water quality, stress, mood, genetics, status within a group and other bio-behavioral factors, and lighting-- not just bulb color temperature and how it affects the appearance of fish color, but sunlight versus artificial light, how comfortable your fish are in the specific brightness of light (since different fish have differing lighting preferences and some will be darker or lighter or more intensely colored or more washed out at different lighting levels) and similar factors.

Another way some miss the boat is with the simplistic idea that the color of a nutrient equals that color in the fish. Doesn't exactly work that way. Let's take spirulina. Think it's good for blue fish simply because its a bluish-green food? Know what goes into that blue-green color? Look it up. Spirulina includes a lot of yellow/orange/red nutrients, including beta-carotene (orange/red), zeaxanthin (yellow, gives corn its yellow color), and b-cryptoxanthin (the orange in apricots, citrus fruits, etc.)

What about astaxanthin, the red nutrient/pigment in salmon, shrimp, pink flamingos, etc? Astaxanthin can also produce blue (and other colors), as can other carotenoids (the class of red/orange/yellow pigments). Like the other carotenoids, it depends on how it's absorbed and processed by the animal and this differs with different species. This is well known and well studied in science and commercial aquaculture. Just a couple of many references on this:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00227-005-1558-0
The phenotypic brownish-green color of an American lobster (Homarus americanus Milne-Edwards, 1837) is determined by genetic and dietary mechanisms. Diet influences color through the carotenoid astaxanthin. This pigment can appear red or blue depending if it is bound to protein, and the relative amounts of each form influence lobster color.
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Carotenoid blues: Structural studies on carotenoproteins
This review concentrates on the carotenoproteins, which are commonly found in marine invertebrate animals and are responsible for green, purple or blue colours, in contrast to the yellow, orange or red of the free carotenoid.
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It's simple, the color of the nutrient does not always create the same color in the animal. That's why my Kapampa fronts are as blue as anyone else's on a diet that provides quite a bit of astaxanthin (foods with salmon, shrimp, and krill ingredients).

So, back to your point that food is not more important than water quality, genetics, etc. I largely agree with this. But this doesn't mean you can take away the value of good nutrition as a piece of the puzzle. And from the reading I've done I'd even further qualify this to the extent that some nutrients will help fish withstand the stress from less than perfect conditions in their tank... up to a point, of course.
 
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