I think you over feed your fish!
- Thread starter Redearsunfish
- Start date
I am definitely guilty of overfeeding. Sometimes I just cant get enough of watching my fish eat. I do vary it up though, and water change as needed... my fish are all very fat.
Fatty livers too..
Correct, which is why feeding fish is part art, and part science. Generally smaller, younger, more active fish have higher metabolic rates which requires their nutrient intake to be greater, and more frequent, than many larger species. (on a percentage basis)
While that may be true of your local North American waterways, it doesn't always play out that way with tropical warm water species, such as those ornamental species of fish that most keep in their aquarium, where in the wild the feed conditions are often dictated by seasonal fluctuations in the weather due to the rainy season (feast) vs the dry season. (famine) And even during times when feed conditions are optimum, while many fish will either be feeding, or breeding, most of the foodstuffs taken in are mostly made up from water, and/or are much lower in overall nutrient density, vs the dry food that most people feed in this hobby. Calorie wise, it is much easier to overfeed a fish in captivity with nutrient rich dry food, than it is feeding a diet that largely consists of water, as satiation levels will be reached much quicker when consuming the latter.
Having said all that, overall it is my opinion that most hobbyists do in fact overfeed their fish, and on this site alone there is ample evidence of that. (obese fish) Most pet owners do in fact kill their pets with kindness, including dogs, cats, etc.
This really shouldn't come as any surprise, considering the fact that many believe that we now have an epidemic of human (including children) obesity here in North America. Another opinion that I concur with.
i have a simple solution to this leave your wife to feed them while you work away lol, that way they get a varied diet and a mix feed routine its work for me for years cause i work away a lot lol
Great points.
By the by, when I catch largemouth bass when fishing (please practice catch and release) most of them seem to be at the point of starvation. I'm not sure that big fish can easily catch enough food to become fat - outside of the odd predator that is highly efficient and has learned to adopt to an easy meal - e.g. largemouth bass feeding on trout in stocked lakes - they will wait at the truck that dumps out the trout, and have an easy meal.
In our aquariums however, especially when eating processed foods, our fish can easily become fat.
Unless your life's work is the study of tropical fish in their natural habitat, you have no clue what your fish would be doing all day in the wild, what they would be eating and how much. And even if you did, you would still have to map that to the nutrient and calorie content of the food you buy in the store. None of us have the first clue. I don't think fish scientists do, either. And to make it worse, they only guy I've seen post any serious knowledge about feeding fish on this website (RD) just said it's "part art". Great.
And then couple all that lack of knowledge with the different species, at different ages and sizes, and different levels of aggression during feeding time, and I don't think there's any way for a hobbyist to feed fish optimally in his spare time. Maybe, MAYBE, if you have a single wet pet in a tank and you have studied that fish for years, and you've studied his habitat, and actually been to its habitat in person, maybe...but you still don't know enough about store bought foods to match its wild diet.
Lookit--imagine the number of debates that continue on this website for years on end with no resolution about the most basic points of feeding these fish--varied diet or all NLS, how much or how often to feed species X, just to name a couple. Heck, half the time we're not entirely sure what species of fish we have in our tank. We often have trouble sexing our fish when we DO know the species.
Feeding as much as filtration can handle sounds sensible for a second or two....until you consider that on THIS site, half of us have so overfiltered our tanks with 10X turnover and freshwater drips that we could feed our fish until they explode before we'd see an ammonia or nitrate spike. There are people on here dripping their entire tank volume every week!
Does anybody have some commonsense guidelines for feeding a 6-12 inch Vieja? Parachromis? Amphilophus? Herichthys? Trimac? I've never seen that. "At 8-10 inches, a Vieja/Paratheraps in good health should consume ? 3mm NLS pellets per day. Or, ? 3mm NLS pellets per week, with 2 days of fasting". Now THAT would help me.
Because then, everyday, I could net out each one of 20 fish in my tank, put him in a 40 gallon to feed him the right amount, and then put him back in the main tank.
Look, I love keeping fish, and I love all of you....but, at some point, we have to just admit that we don't know what we're doing. Just throw some pellets in the water and keep the tank clean. Anything more is navel gazing.
And then couple all that lack of knowledge with the different species, at different ages and sizes, and different levels of aggression during feeding time, and I don't think there's any way for a hobbyist to feed fish optimally in his spare time. Maybe, MAYBE, if you have a single wet pet in a tank and you have studied that fish for years, and you've studied his habitat, and actually been to its habitat in person, maybe...but you still don't know enough about store bought foods to match its wild diet.
Lookit--imagine the number of debates that continue on this website for years on end with no resolution about the most basic points of feeding these fish--varied diet or all NLS, how much or how often to feed species X, just to name a couple. Heck, half the time we're not entirely sure what species of fish we have in our tank. We often have trouble sexing our fish when we DO know the species.
Feeding as much as filtration can handle sounds sensible for a second or two....until you consider that on THIS site, half of us have so overfiltered our tanks with 10X turnover and freshwater drips that we could feed our fish until they explode before we'd see an ammonia or nitrate spike. There are people on here dripping their entire tank volume every week!
Does anybody have some commonsense guidelines for feeding a 6-12 inch Vieja? Parachromis? Amphilophus? Herichthys? Trimac? I've never seen that. "At 8-10 inches, a Vieja/Paratheraps in good health should consume ? 3mm NLS pellets per day. Or, ? 3mm NLS pellets per week, with 2 days of fasting". Now THAT would help me.
Because then, everyday, I could net out each one of 20 fish in my tank, put him in a 40 gallon to feed him the right amount, and then put him back in the main tank.
Look, I love keeping fish, and I love all of you....but, at some point, we have to just admit that we don't know what we're doing. Just throw some pellets in the water and keep the tank clean. Anything more is navel gazing.
A common sense guideline that one can always fall back on is to gauge how much you feed, by the growth and overall physical makeup of ones fish. Feeding too much, fish gets fat & lazy, feeding too little, fish shows poor growth and gets skinny. Too much solid waste being produced, try a different brand and compare overall digestibility. No one can tell me what MY fish needs for optimum growth and overall health, because no one but me knows it's activity level, and overall behaviour, in MY tank. Maybe your fish does great on six 3mm pellets once a day, but mine does better on 5 3mm pellets, twice a day. You have to find your own groove, and what works best for your fish.
No need to have a background in the science of fish nutrition, a little bit of common sense goes a long ways towards the "art" part of the equation. The rest comes with time, and experience.
states poorly, that as a general rule I'll bet the majority of us overfeed. That's it.
My point is I have a heavy hand, because I enjoy nurturing, and like my mother and mother-in-law, that means cooking and feeding food to those under your care - as much as you can stuff in their traps.
And I think its better to ever-so-slightly underfeed, than it is to power feed... because ever-so-slightly underfeeding for me is probably exactly what my fish need to thrive.
