food
- Thread starter badboy24
- Start date
If your talking about pellets, what is "best" depends on user preference I think... For instance, most people in the Asian region use the Ocean or X.O. pellets (which do contain hormone). I feed mine, ChingMix and sometimes Nutrafin Algae pellets.... I hear Hikari is also very good, Grand Sumo (apparently superb quality food, but damn expensive for me)...
Chingmix does both color enhancements and they have growth/head booster pellets... I personally use less color enhancing pellets, since its not REALLY good for your fish...I read a lot of posts, articles and reviews before I purchased my food.
Chingmix does both color enhancements and they have growth/head booster pellets... I personally use less color enhancing pellets, since its not REALLY good for your fish...I read a lot of posts, articles and reviews before I purchased my food.
Don't waste your money on overpriced flowerhorn foods just get some new life spectrum cichlid pellets.
If your talking about pellets, what is "best" depends on user preference I think... For instance, most people in the Asian region use the Ocean or X.O. pellets (which do contain hormone). I feed mine, ChingMix and sometimes Nutrafin Algae pellets.... I hear Hikari is also very good, Grand Sumo (apparently superb quality food, but damn expensive for me)...
Chingmix does both color enhancements and they have growth/head booster pellets... I personally use less color enhancing pellets, since its not REALLY good for your fish...I read a lot of posts, articles and reviews before I purchased my food.
Where do you come up with some of this stuff?
My eyes start to glaze over from some of the info I see posted in this forum, people who have been keeping FH for a year or two & suddenly they know ALL of the inner secrets to breeding, feeding, and raising a type of fish that has the EXACT same husbandry requirements (including dietary requirements) of most other large aggressive omnivorous CA cichlids. There is no *magical* food that will produce massive nuchal humps, and while a quality diet helps, most of it boils down to genetics, the same as it does for every other fish on the planet. Ditto to pH, general hardness, and all the other crap that some people post here due to some mumbo jumbo some breeder overseas has told them.
I see you constantly stating that Ocean Free products such as XO contain hormones, yet beyond the word of a single breeder in SE Asia you have nothing to support that claim. While I wouldn't personally recommend the use of most Ocean Free products for feeding FH, my concern is the massive amount of protein that some of these specialty FH foods contain. You can read my comment about Ocean Free products such as XO in the past discussion.
http://www.monsterfishkeepers.com/forums/showthread.php?411368-Types-of-pellets-for-Flowerhorn
As far as the use of hormones, one could say the same thing about Chingmix, or any other food manufactured in SE Asia, where regulations are a world apart from the manufacturing regulations here in North America. The fact that Qian Hu exports their Ocean Free line of food to the UK (a country with VERY strict import regulations), and has millions upon millions of $$$ at stake IF their food was ever found to contain any type of added hormones, would make me feel far more comfortable about their potential use of hormones, than an Indonesian company such as Chingmix that is so small the news would barely make a blip on the International commercial fish food radar.
As far as color enhancing goes, there are natural color enhancing agents, such as krill, spirulina, various micro-algae that are high in astaxanthin, etc, and there are man made color enhancing agents, such as Carophyll Pink, etc. All fish kept in captivity require a diet that contains color enhancing agents, unless one prefers bland looking fish. That's just a reality, the key is feeding a food that utilizes raw ingredients that contain natural color enhaning agents, not just a boat load of Carophyll Pink so that even genetically deficient fish (color wise) look bright red.
The bottom line is I concur with Cam, these so called *specialty* FH foods are overpriced, some of them by massive amounts when you compare them to other CA cichlid foods that have been on the market for the past 20 yrs or more.
end of rant .....
It is hard to say what has hormone and what doesn't until tested and verified. Everyone goes by what they prefer and what they like. Overall, most food that I have used ends out with just about the same result. NLS, Hikari, Alife, CM, Sumo, Super Red...you name it.