Cost of Feeding Monsters

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divemaster99

divemaster99

Dovii
MFK Member
Jan 10, 2014
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Pittsburgh, PA
So... The other day I was adding up the costs of all my fish related expensives coming up within the next couple of months and realized I'm not made of money. So I decided to improvise something. Instead of doing a 180G and an outdoor pond, I'm putting in an indoor pond, I've already begun buying supplies for this beast. The smallest it would be would be 6'x6'x30" but I'm probably going to do 7'x7'x30" (916G). For stock I'm thinking I'm about 80% sure I want to do monster catfish, the other 20% of me wants to do natives but I think the view is more suited to catfish personally. For stock I'd definitely have my gibbiceps pleco, striped raph, and yellow bullhead but I want a half dozen or so more BIG (well as big as I can go for this setup) cats. Such cats like a Niger, Giraffe, Channel, Achara, TSN, RTC (last one would be a growout). My question is what would be approximately my monthly, or even weekly costs to properly feed all these giant catfish and would could I feed them to make sure they've got plenty of nutrition but I'm not going bankrupt? Thanks for the help?
 
well...lets get down to what you'll be feeding them.

that many cats, all with the potential to be over 12-14" long, is going to be a lot of food.

Pellets would bankrupt you pretty quickly. Even the cheap ones add up fast when you are feeding that many cats.

Tilapia is probably going to be your other staple. Those bags are roughly 8-9 dollars for 2 pounds. Once those cats hit the 10"-1' mark, they'll go through that in a week easily.

Shrimp would probably be your snack item and thats generally the same price as tilapia for maybe slightly smaller portions.

There is always the option in the summer time or actually right now even of catching bass and bluegill and fileting them yourself and feeding that. Free but the risk of parasites is ultimately higher.

I would say a safe conservative guess would be about 10 bucks a week brotha. I'd say 50ish a month if you are diversifying their diet pretty well. Those are super conservative guesses. Hell a bag of massivore alone is 30.


I'm nervous right now about how much I'm going to be blowing through between my sunfish and bullhead. Not to mention my florida gar and pickerel and then the bichirs once they put on some size...I can't imagine that many catfish...be like throwing money into a bottomless pit lol.
 
predatorkeeper87 said:
well...lets get down to what you'll be feeding them.

that many cats, all with the potential to be over 12-14" long, is going to be a lot of food.

Pellets would bankrupt you pretty quickly. Even the cheap ones add up fast when you are feeding that many cats.

Tilapia is probably going to be your other staple. Those bags are roughly 8-9 dollars for 2 pounds. Once those cats hit the 10"-1' mark, they'll go through that in a week easily.

Shrimp would probably be your snack item and thats generally the same price as tilapia for maybe slightly smaller portions.

There is always the option in the summer time or actually right now even of catching bass and bluegill and fileting them yourself and feeding that. Free but the risk of parasites is ultimately higher.

I would say a safe conservative guess would be about 10 bucks a week brotha. I'd say 50ish a month if you are diversifying their diet pretty well. Those are super conservative guesses. Hell a bag of massivore alone is 30.


I'm nervous right now about how much I'm going to be blowing through between my sunfish and bullhead. Not to mention my florida gar and pickerel and then the bichirs once they put on some size...I can't imagine that many catfish...be like throwing money into a bottomless pit lol.
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$50 is way better than I thought. Plus my local lake is crowed with stunted sunnies so there's free food, I'll just freeze or boil the parasites out.
 
divemaster99 said:
$50 is way better than I thought. Plus my local lake is crowed with stunted sunnies so there's free food, I'll just freeze or boil the parasites out.
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yuuuuup, I plan on collecting quit a bit of blues and sunnies from the ponds up the road from me this spring.

well $50 is super conservative as I said haha it could easily be more depending on how much they actually eat.
 
99% of my cats in the 24-36" range all eat pellets so they are in fact pretty cheap to keep full.... they get prepared fish for "treats" or when its on sale at the grocery store and live fish in the summers but i spent many years dumping shrimp and cut fish to them exclusively and it adds up very quick. Its as expensive as you want it to be really, most the cats u list will willingly accept pellets. And i recommend making ur pond 8'x8' at the smallest. If u cant fit that go a good 6'x12'. Larger volumes of water are far easier to maintain and the more the better when keeping dirty ole cats.

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Predatorkeeper: pellets are cheaper than seafood/fish any day of the week. Catfish do not need massivore or designer pellets. Ive picked up 25lb bags of catfish chow for $15.00. Kens pellets are also affordable. I order 20lbs or so at a time for around $30-40 and it lasts me a couple months. Large cats also do not need to eat every day.

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Have a lookout for bulk seafood offers. Can easily get a 2lb bag of seafood for under 5$ on offer, also smelts are extremely cheap so have a lookout for those.
 
wednesday13 said:
99% of my cats in the 24-36" range all eat pellets so they are in fact pretty cheap to keep full.... they get prepared fish for "treats" or when its on sale at the grocery store and live fish in the summers but i spent many years dumping shrimp and cut fish to them exclusively and it adds up very quick. Its as expensive as you want it to be really, most the cats u list will willingly accept pellets. And i recommend making ur pond 8'x8' at the smallest. If u cant fit that go a good 6'x12'. Larger volumes of water are far easier to maintain and the more the better when keeping dirty ole cats.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using MonsterAquariaNetwork Appo
Click to expand...

Cool. I was going to do 8'x8' but then there'd only be 1' of a path to walk to my laundry room :). I'll see if I can squeeze an 12'x6' though, if not I'll just do smaller cats or natives. This will be going in my Fishroom which is roughly 30'x10-12' so I have to conserve space for the other 24 tanks that will be going down there plus my washer, dryer, and furnace.
 
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