Goldfish are Nutritious

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This is great humor guys. I'll work at my pace thank you. Of course you won't answer my question about how fast water soluble vitamins leach out of a wet pellet. As I said, it's a question feed salesmen don't answer. A trial is really the only way to settle the discussion. Two challenges RD.

a) Show me a published study where superior growth was achieved with a commercial diet over live. You know those trials have been conducted.

b) Give a brief outline as to what you would consider a fair feed trial of live vs. commercial. You told one poster earlier that you are quite knowledgeable in this area.

Come on, I know you got the time. Look how much time you and your cohorts spend trying to bury me. My own views on this issue are evolving as we go forward. Hopefully yours will too. If not, then I will expect more unconvincing excuses as to why you feel no reason to help me out. Every time you say that it shows your insecurity in your product and your concern that people may see that commercial diets are at least equal parts marketing to nutrition. Commercial diets are not evil. They have their place. If you use them properly the top tier diets will give adequate nutrition. Live foods too are not evil. They have their place. It doesn't have to come from the store. It can be grown at home in a bin. It can be harvested from a water feature in the backyard. There are countless ways one can go live and provide their fish with a more diverse and nutritionally complete diet that won't cost a thing. That is the evolution of things. That is sound advice that any expert in the field would dispense. Goldfish are nutritious. I have presented the published data to support that early on. Next step is to demonstrate it in a feed trial. However, I have moved past discussing just goldfish. As I research the topic it is clear to me that a diverse diet is the most appropriate model with at least three unique prey itmes considered as being the minimum.
 
sjkoi said:
This is great humor guys. I'll work at my pace thank you. Of course you won't answer my question about how fast water soluble vitamins leach out of a wet pellet. As I said, it's a question feed salesmen don't answer. A trial is really the only way to settle the discussion. Two challenges RD.
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RD. is just tired of you, as are a few other members I see. Here's one study about your "vitamins leaching out of pellets" question:

http://www.mendeley.com/research/stability-ascorbic-acid-other-vitamins-extruded-fish-feeds/
Abstract:
Alternative sources of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) have recently been proposed as a solution to the problem of instability of this vitamin in aquaculture feeds. Several of these forms were tested for stability in main types of feeds. In addition, the stability of other vitamins was investigated in a catfish feed. Ascorbyl monophosphate and ascorbyl polyphosphate were found to be quite stable, i.e. retentions were higher than 90% in the stored extruded feeds and above 85% in the stored semi-moist feeds. Coated forms of vitamin C were unstable. Retentions were around 50% after extrusion, and below 16% in the stored fish feeds. Losses of the other vitamins in the catfish diet were small.

I'm not going to go to the trouble to post any other study, you will likely just ignore and find some way to refute those as well.

As far as "feed trials," I don't know how much better you're going to get than the dozens of members here that feed pellets exclusively with drop dead gorgeous fish that have great growth rates and obviously are in good health.

Three unique prey items? Let's see, my fish get krill, herring and squid. That's three right there.

You wanna feed your fish goldfish? Cool. Frozen rats? Fine. Hot dogs? Splendid. I'm sure you get good growth and decent color out of your stock.

But claiming that a high quality pellet will not compare to such a diet just makes you look ignorant and is obviously turning opinion against you on this board. This will be my actual last post on this thread. I'm sure you will come up with some witty and long winded post ignoring and refuting what I and everyone else has posted, so I'll tell you what... I'll keep keeping pellet fed, high quality fish, and you keep pumping out those feeders and convincing everyone those GOLDfish are actually as valuable as gold.
 
Not trying to bury any one here at all, but the only thing I have to offer is personal experience. Once upon a time, I fed feeder goldfish to my saltwater eels and triggers and nothing but. They all did well I thought, they all grew and none got sick. But, buying and keeping feeders was beginning to become a royal pita with my schedule, so I switched to fresh/frozen seafoods out of necessity more than anything. Fed them nothing but market shrimp, tilapia, cod, whatever was on sale sometimes. The fish in that tank all improved in color and size over the course of a year. Not to scientific unfortunately, but I saw that with my own eyes....

Fast forward a bit and I get into larger freshwater setups where my logic behind feeding is that variety is best. 9 different foods, 5 frozen 4 prepared never feeding the same thing more than once away or week, depending on the food. But that too became a pita trying to keep up with all of it while traveling and my wife feeds the fish..........I needed something easier, so pellet exclusive diet was worth a shot. Brand A was fed for 3 months only, and there was a noticeable improvement in both color and size from the "kitchen sink" diet I was throwing at them. I also fed less food in the process, going down to one feeding a day. I was pretty surprised. So, I move on to Brand B. Same three month diet, this time the difference was even more noticeable. My wife and daughter even started asking about it. Once again, feeding less, but of just a pellet.

Brand c will get it's shot over the next few months and I'll make my decision as to what brand I'll stay with, but either way, I'm convinced. I don't need a paper somewhere to tell me about the nutrient profile of diet a vs diet b. I've tested the diets on my own fish and all that could take a pellet showed improvements in color and size. Once in a blue moon Ill give them some worms, shrimp or the odd vegetable they'll steal from my plecos, but they all are on one food per tank.

And the hospital tank has been dry so long it's turning into a sump lol

You are right, goldfish are nutritious. I've just found that there are more nutritious alternatives based purely only on my own experiences
 
LMAO, great humor indeed. You speak of pellets as offering adequate nutrition, yet from what I have seen in this discussion you seemingly fail to understand even the basic concepts regarding the subject.

In case it slipped your mind, Rich, you're the one that brought Musky into this discussion, and yet when I provided evidence that a hybrid Tiger Musky raised in an indoor intensive system will reach 10" eating pellet feed, at the exact same rate that a Musky will that is fed fathead minnows in an outdoor pond, what happened? You once again chose to ignore the facts.

And those weren't my facts or stats, but those of the Hatchery Superintendent at the Hackettstown State Fish Hatchery. There's your "fair" non-biased feed trial involving a species of fish classified as a piscivore. Your aquarium Lion if you will.

Now factor into the equation that those Tiger Musky pellets will with 100% certainty be nothing more than a cheap generic commercial trout chow pellet, with only one form of animal protein (fish meal) and will contain the bare minimum of vitamin values. No micro-algae, no spirulina, no krill, no bioactive compounds, etc, just a simple high protein high fat formula that puts on fast growth in a young fish. Those trout chow pellets probably cost less than $40 for a 50lb bag, yet amazingly enough even when fed those low cost lower quality pellets those Musky raised indoors, in an intensive system, somehow still seem to achieve the same amount of "growth" (which seems to be your only measuring stick for a healthy fish), as those raised outdoors in a pond, and fed fathead minnows.

As stated previously, the burden of proof is on you amigo, you started this thread, not I. Yet you offer nothing but more bogus info, and then spin doctor things in an attempt to achieve knee jerk reactions from the masses such as the (gasp) leaching of water soluble vitamins from pellets, as though everyone here who (gasp) feeds pellets own vitamin deficient fish, suffering from scoliosis, anemia, anorexia, cataracts, edema, goiter, poor growth, & God only knows what else. Whatever.

I can answer anything that you throw at me Rich, and then some, the problem is you can't seem to grasp any of it. I don't know if it's due to stubbornness, ignorance, a lack of reading comprehension skills, or the fact that you have an obvious agenda in promoting live feeders over all other feed options. I'm guessing the latter.

Either way, there's really no point in going in circles any further, at least not for me.

Carry on ..........
 
Does anybody realise that there is simply no point in continuing this thread? There is no longer anything to be gained based on the pointed arguements that have very little to do with the issue at hand, rather more to do with promoting ones self or attacking the other. To be honest as a complete outsider and with no dog in this fight I tend to follow along with formulated diets based on science for aquaculture. To be honest I can't imagine that companies with millions of dollars invested would move towards developing feeds for growth other than live foods if they were not: comparable in cost, comparable in growth vs cost, comparable in health vs cost, and comparable in overall results vs cost. If the base arguement were true then commercial feeds would not be the norm rather they would be the exception.

I honestly read this thread to find out if anybody can quit kicking a dead horse... it seems nobody can.. so I would ask a mod to please put an end to the thread as evidence show nothing of value has come from it for quite some time.
 
I'll slow it down and make my posts count. I will post the relavent articles I run across here and try to avoid the inevitable snipping that follows. This discussion has evolved considerably since its inception. We have seen a paper that shows goldfish and other minnows are high in protein and low in fat. We have knocked down the concern that thiaminase contributes to vitamin B deficiency when fed live to warm-water species. I offered a paper concerning live fish fed to Muskie by the State of Missouri and asked if anyone had ever seen a paper presented that demonstrated superior growth with a commercial diet vs. live. No takers on that. We were touching on the vitamin stability of pelleted diets and leaching of water soluble vitamins out of a pellet once immersed in water. Surprisingly, no answer there either. I have again asked the pellet camp to offer suggestions on what they would consider to be a fair feed trial. No response. I am moving the discussion forward and getting very few answers to my questions. That is why it has bogged down. I could be wrong. The best way to evaluate this is to hold my nose and mush on, but I'll be more disciplined in my responses.
 
I was thinking about the interaction between prey items and piscivores and was wondering why the lion analogy seemed so “flat”. The interaction between a feeder and its hunter seems more dynamic than if you were to imagine a lion hunting in its zoo habitat. Then it occurred to me it was because the analogy was “flat”. Fish hunt in three dimensions. To get the equivalent area needed in a zoo you would need to multiply the lion pen by the height of the aquarium divided by the height of the fish so:

Equivalent zoo pen = (area)(height of aquaria / height of fish)

The ideal aquaria that uses feeders will have plenty of cover for prey to hide and only a couple of feeders should be fed several times a week. The action of hunting is a large portion of a fish’s natural behavior and it stands to reason that simulating natural conditions and activities is important to any species held in captivity.
 
sjkoi said:
I was thinking about the interaction between prey items and piscivores and was wondering why the lion analogy seemed so “flat”. The interaction between a feeder and its hunter seems more dynamic than if you were to imagine a lion hunting in its zoo habitat. Then it occurred to me it was because the analogy was “flat”. Fish hunt in three dimensions. To get the equivalent area needed in a zoo you would need to multiply the lion pen by the height of the aquarium divided by the height of the fish so:

Equivalent zoo pen = (area)(height of aquaria / height of fish)

The ideal aquaria that uses feeders will have plenty of cover for prey to hide and only a couple of feeders should be fed several times a week. The action of hunting is a large portion of a fish’s natural behavior and it stands to reason that simulating natural conditions and activities is important to any species held in captivity.
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For some of us simulating this is difficult with the species we keep. If I put 10 feeders in my community tank, my Freddy would eat all of them before my Midas even knew that they were meant for food. Cover or not my Freedy sees small fish as food and others see them as tankmates......
 
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