About a month ago, a millennium rainbow fish mysteriously died in one of my tanks, it may have been stress related due to the addition of other fish but I don't know for sure. My young son tossed the fish into another tank to feed a hi red fin wolf fish which ate it in seconds. Of course my reaction was to panic and worry about disease being spread, but nothing happened to the wolf fish. Over the weekend a dead small black skirt tetra appeared in a completely different tank and once again my son fed it to the wolf fish. So far no ill effect. He explained to me that wolf fish in the wild will routinely eat dead fish as well as live fish and we shouldn't be so concerned about the problems of disease being spread via diet as their stomachs and immune system can deal with it. Were we just lucky or is he right?
Feeding recently dead fish to other fish
- Thread starter UES96
- Start date
-
- Tags
- dead fish feeding
Probably a bit of both.. scavengers do have a generally robust constitution.. but doing anything like what you're talking about is always a risk factor. Ultimately , even scavengers get sick.
ive been throwing dead and or half eaten fish to my larger fish for yrs now with no ill effects... not saying the chance isnt there for pathogens to get into ur other fish but 99% of the time im feeding fish that were clearly killed or half eaten by others. my rays like to chew the heads off my 6-8" tinfoils...they make a good meal for my big cats. nothing goes to waste that way.
How the fish died would be a major factor. Did it died from trauma or did it succumb to disease. If its a disease, is it an infectious disease? If you feed a fish that was apparently sick and finally died, from a different tank, then it definitely will increase the chance of contracting any potential infectious disease.