Floating or Sinking Food

[SarcasticWit]

I am curious about floating vs sinking food...

I presently feed floating food, but see that many people feed their cichlids sinking food, which leads to a few questions on my part...And it seems, looking at the foods available, that most cichlid identified food is of the sinking variety...

1. Which do you prefer, the floating or sinking and why?

2. How to do you get your fish to change from floating to sinking without food rotting on the bottom if you don't have any bottom dwellers?

3. Do they just normally know to ingest the sinking food and not ingest substrate?

 

[Rocksor]

1. Depends on how the fish naturally feeds, based on the orientation of the mouth. If it's upturned like an arowana, peacock bass, or oscar, I generally feed floating. If it's down turned like a GT, then bottom feeding pellets. Some fish with forward facing mouths will take food from the bottom like JD and pikes.

2. Not all fish will take food from the bottom. My bass won't touch the food there. It wants food floating or sinking.

3. Fish know what is food and substrate, and are actually generally good at just sucking in the food without substrate, except for sand sifters like firemouths or geophagus.

Don't force your fish onto sinking pellets if it won't touch them. See what works and what doesn't.

 

[krichardson]

Agreed with Rocksor.While most of the fish that I currently have....dats and cichla will greedily chase the pellets down no matter where they are I have have had cichlids and other fish that would only feed at certain levels of the tank.