How much is too much food

[VTHokie]

My JD has a pretty stable diet of pellets, krill, beef heart, and blood worms which i rotate from day to day. Ultimately he gets three meals a day (Early morning, afternoon, and night). Right now Bruiser is about 5 inches long, but he never seems to be full. I've been catching a lot of crickets and grasshoppers for him as snacks. The food is definately not going to waste as he quickly devours everything I put in his tank, but is there a point where I should be concerned that he is over eating? The other day he ate 4 crickets (each about a half inch long) and would have gone after a 5th if my goldwonder hadn't snagged it first.
I do regular 25% water changes twice a week, and he's grown about an inch since i got him a month ago. He also looks bulkier, but not morbid, and he definately has great coloration and appears very happy and healthy. Really i'm just trying to guage what everyone else feels is appropriate amount of food for a rapidly growing cichlid.

 

[cichlidfish]

It does sound like a lot. I would cut out the beef heart and grasshoppers completely. I would cut back on the other foods too, and save the crickets for treats. The pellets should be the main food offered, because they offer fiber and vitamins. Most people don't feed thier fish every day. Maybe don't feed one day once a week.

 

[Natalie]

Welcome to MFK!

I agree with cichldifsh. I'm not a fan of beefheart because it's so fatty and really fouls up your water. Plus, mammalian meat is not in a cichlid's normal diet so I worry that it does damage to the digestive tract as it tries to digest the extra fat.

Crickets don't have much nutritional value. They're fun to feed as the occasional treat but there are much better foods out there, nutrition-wise. Pellets should be your staple food (I love rotating daily with Hikari, HBH, and NLS pellets).

If what you're wanting is fast growth rate, I think 2-3 meals a day is fine. You can also increase your tank's temperature to ~80 F if you want for him to grow at the fastest possible rate. One inch in the past month is fantastic.

It sounds like you're doing a great job. Remember, several meals a day will foul up the water pretty quickly. You said you're doing 25% WC twice a week. That's a good start. In my growout tanks in the past, I've done up to 50% twice a week. Just test your water if you're concerned the nitrates are getting too high. They should be no more than 20 ppm for the absolute best health of your fish, and most people try to keep them lower than that.

 

[VTHokie]

Thanks for the advise. The Hikari pellets are definately the staple food. Beefheart is typically a once a week food, followed by a water change to keep the water from fouling. He's also taken a liking to the algea tabs i have for the pleco in his tank.

 

[Natalie]

Yeah my cichlids have always liked stealing algae food too. I bought some HBH Spirulina pellets from Petsmart and they were my Tex's absolute favorite food. Spirulina is supposed to be good for maximum growth rate too, so you may want to add that into your mix of foods.

 

[VTHokie]

I have a sample of cichlid excel (high in spirulina) coming from hikari that I wanted to try out on Bruiser to see how he likes it. Until then i throw an extra algea disk in there for him.

 

[DWass]

I don't think you can overfeed a Jack Dempsey. They can eat many times a day. The trick is to never feed them to much at a single feeding. 10 small feedings a day is better than 2 huge feedings a day. That way all the food is cunsumed. It's really up to what you are looking for from your fish.

 

[Sarah88]

yeah i would just use up the beef heart you already have and then not bother with it anymore, keep the pellet as the staple and just continue to feed like you have been, and i think grasshoppers from outside would probably be more nutritious than crickets from the store that need to be gut loaded. but yeah as long as there isnt food left in the tnak and you are doing enough water changes to keep the water clean then he should be fine, also keep a look out for how fat he is, sometimes when i overfeed for a couple days i see my fish gain weight and their bellies will actually make it so that their tubes stick out slightly, when i see this then i just limit their intake for a couple days until they go back to normal and then just remember to feed a little less after that