Just sitting at one of my tanks thinking, This Fall while fishing a large private lake that is never disturbed, lots of fallen trees at the edge, decaying, Leaves everywhere,water kinda green and murkey. I pulled several young Green sunfish out useing a small barbless hook, I catch and release anything i dont intend to keep, What i noticed was that out of this seemingly cruddy water the fish were the most beautiful colors, greens and oranges, fat and healthy. In my tanks the water is crystal clear, no tannens, no decaying leaves, and the fish are somewhat paled out by comparison. Are we fooling ourselves with this pristeen water??
Captive fish colors
- Thread starter JIM
- Start date
they get their natural diet, and there is much more variety of food available. aside from that some fish do better with tannens in the water. and maybe the water of that lake is not as cruddy as it seems to the eye and it is refilled with natural rainwater and not our tapwater that has who knows what in it (from going through pipes, softeners, etc.). it is nature at its finest, its hard to compete with that
It has something to do with the variety of food available in the wild but it is more because the fish you have seen in the lake are all wild, when fish are captive bred over a number of generations they lose characteristics that their wild counterparts display, in this case colouration. You will notice this if you compare a wild fish in a aquarium to a captive bred one.
Yep, thats why people buy wild caught fish... but my fish seem to be happier when there are tannins in the water but there is no big difference.