Flake food vs pellet
- Thread starter Cichlomaniac
- Start date
When I have trouble getting a flake fed fish to switch to pellets I usually mix the two for a little while. To me it seems like less of a preference issue and more of an issue where they don't realize it is food.
Sound like you need to starve your fish for a week or two and try giving them pellets.. Pellets are better as other states I feed my fry tiny pellets that sink which very tiny and bloodworms
jk I guess it's more like plant food than fish food my plants get more benefits from it than my fish do as all the nutrients end up in the water.
Take a styrofoam cup cut off the rim place the amount of flake food in there when flake gets wet will drop in the same area and the fish will even eat food within the floating rim if fish is small enough. I also use a short section of 3-4 inch wide pvc pipe and you will get the same result.
I've yet to see that be true of any fish I've ever kept, this includes years of keeping Cyphotilapia, a fish that some have been told shouldn't ingest air due to being a deep water fish. The logic of the gulping air bugaboo is flawed. If 'gulping air' was the issue some make it out to be for some species, you couldn't net them from the tank to transfer them to a bag, bucket, or another tank, you couldn't take them out to strip eggs or fry or to measure them without risk, yet some of the same people who claim floating foods and gulping air are a danger do these other things without giving it a thought. Catch and release for fisherman would be a sham, and the same for biologists who might catch, measure, weigh, take scale or fin samples for DNA analysis, then tag for tracking before releasing them back to the water. Stress from handling is one thing, but the gulping air theory is flawed logic.
I've fed both floating and sinking pellets over the years, I prefer sinking, but have fed a lot of both, and I've fed a lot of freeze dried shrimps, etc., which also float. No problems at all from floating foods. Not only that, even with the sinking pellets I feed, some of my fish, including some of the Cyphotilapia are up at the surface 'gulping air' as soon as I open the lid and going after pellets as soon as they hit the water. No problems, nothing.
Don't know what other people are doing who think they're getting swim bladder issues (or conditions that mimic swim bladder issues) from floating foods, but potential causes are overly cool water, injury, infection, or wrong ingredients in their foods. A number of aquaculture studies have shown some plant based ingredients, like soybean meal (and some other forms of soy) can cause intestinal inflammation in fish, and certain combinations can do the same, like soy and peas. (Species differ in the levels of such ingredients they can tolerate.)
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