How many days a week should large fishes be fed ?
- Thread starter jake37
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For adult fish - Once a day at best, skip a few days here and there. Keep them guessing, similar to what most wild fish experience in nature. A hungry fish is a healthy fish.
Agree with the above, and its dependant on if the fish is a predator or grazer.
(adult) Predators might only nab a prey item once or twice per week (and miss 8 out ot 9 or 10 attempts).
Those fish that graze on algae or detritus usually have a constant supply and neeed a plentful supply.
Where I collect fish in nature, certain stomachs often display evidence that they only eat occasionally.
And when watching predation attempts, suucess is often quite limited seasonally and by prey availability.
Yet in certain lagoons, vegetarians will visit a ertain tree daily to eat fallen, and low hanging, and tasty leaves
Where I snorkel, Parrot fish (real ones, not the man induced deformed fake cichlids) and damsels visit coral reefs, and keep territororial farm like areas, daily when the tide is right, to graze on them.
I find vegetarians need more constant access to food, than predators
And as said above, an overfed fish, does necessarily not make it a healthy one
(adult) Predators might only nab a prey item once or twice per week (and miss 8 out ot 9 or 10 attempts).
Those fish that graze on algae or detritus usually have a constant supply and neeed a plentful supply.
Where I collect fish in nature, certain stomachs often display evidence that they only eat occasionally.
And when watching predation attempts, suucess is often quite limited seasonally and by prey availability.
Yet in certain lagoons, vegetarians will visit a ertain tree daily to eat fallen, and low hanging, and tasty leaves
Where I snorkel, Parrot fish (real ones, not the man induced deformed fake cichlids) and damsels visit coral reefs, and keep territororial farm like areas, daily when the tide is right, to graze on them.
And as said above, an overfed fish, does necessarily not make it a healthy one
In captivity, IME grazers do just fine on once a day feedings. I have kept and bred numerous species classified as strict herbivores. Feeding more than once a day is also fine, if the overall quantity is limited. In nature, herbivores typically eat all day, due to the very low nutritional value of what they consume in the wild.
It also depends upon the number of fish, and how greedy they are at feeding time.
I currently have about 20 Gymnogeophagus young adults in 120 gallons, where they have spent the winter in preparation for going back outside soon for the warm weather. I've spent a lot of time watching them the past few months. I originally thought that the more often the feeding, the better it simulates the way they would feed in nature, just so long as the overall quantity of food is not enough to cause obesity. But if you watch your fish, you notice that the bigger, more aggressive ones feed more greedily and more successfully than the smaller, more submissive ones. If you feed a tiny pinch of food a dozen times a day, the feeding response from the greedy guys is very intense each time; this results in them quickly snatching up most or all of a very small feeding, leaving the little guys hungry.
Feeding larger quantities more often ensures that even the weakest ones will still get some food on each occasion, since the big guys just can't eat it all up in time. Introducing the food at several different points simultaneously, rather than dumping it all in one place, makes a difference as well.
"How often to feed?" is an impossible question to answer; far too broad and too many variables for any simple answer to be accurate. It's much like "How long will it take my ABC fish to grow to X inches in size?"; without specifying a zillion different factors like temperature, water quality, stress or lack thereof, etc. it's meaningless.
With questions like this, there's only one possible correct answer: It depends...
I currently have about 20 Gymnogeophagus young adults in 120 gallons, where they have spent the winter in preparation for going back outside soon for the warm weather. I've spent a lot of time watching them the past few months. I originally thought that the more often the feeding, the better it simulates the way they would feed in nature, just so long as the overall quantity of food is not enough to cause obesity. But if you watch your fish, you notice that the bigger, more aggressive ones feed more greedily and more successfully than the smaller, more submissive ones. If you feed a tiny pinch of food a dozen times a day, the feeding response from the greedy guys is very intense each time; this results in them quickly snatching up most or all of a very small feeding, leaving the little guys hungry.
Feeding larger quantities more often ensures that even the weakest ones will still get some food on each occasion, since the big guys just can't eat it all up in time. Introducing the food at several different points simultaneously, rather than dumping it all in one place, makes a difference as well.
"How often to feed?" is an impossible question to answer; far too broad and too many variables for any simple answer to be accurate. It's much like "How long will it take my ABC fish to grow to X inches in size?"; without specifying a zillion different factors like temperature, water quality, stress or lack thereof, etc. it's meaningless.
With questions like this, there's only one possible correct answer: It depends...