bichirs love minnows. the oscar will like them too if he can catch them. I found it easier to just hold the minnows by the tail on top of the water and let the oscar get it that way.
LIVE FOOD FOR BICHIRS???
- Thread starter baby bass
- Start date
reptileguy2727;5117393; said:
I think you misunderstand me.
The hidden statement was "So what do bichirs eat in the wild then? Definitely not pellets..."
It doesn't matter. They don't eat the things that people commonly feed as live foods, so they are just as unnatural. No matter how hard we try we could never recreate nature. Foods that are live are not 'natural' just because they are live.
What do live foods offer nutritionally that pellets can't?
What do live foods offer nutritionally that pellets can't?
I don't think healthy fish get much exercise from live foods. It certainly doesn't come close to making up for the risks and lack of complete and balanced nutrition.
Live foods carry disease. They can introduce pathogens that can cause problems short term or long term.
Live foods are not nutritionally complete. They are equivalent (at best) to the main protein providing ingredients in high quality pellets, but lack all of the other nutrients provided by all the other ingredients. Long term this leads to malnutrition and premature death. Vitamin deficiencies, deficiencies of trace elements, and imbalanced nutrition can all cause problems and even death long term.
Live foods can increase aggression. This can cause compatibility problems, stress, physical damage, illness, and even death in some situations.
If your fish will eat pellets this is the best thing for them in many ways. There simply isn't a need to introduce the risks of live food, or throw off the balance of an otherwise balanced diet by adding live foods.
Live foods carry disease. They can introduce pathogens that can cause problems short term or long term.
Live foods are not nutritionally complete. They are equivalent (at best) to the main protein providing ingredients in high quality pellets, but lack all of the other nutrients provided by all the other ingredients. Long term this leads to malnutrition and premature death. Vitamin deficiencies, deficiencies of trace elements, and imbalanced nutrition can all cause problems and even death long term.
Live foods can increase aggression. This can cause compatibility problems, stress, physical damage, illness, and even death in some situations.
If your fish will eat pellets this is the best thing for them in many ways. There simply isn't a need to introduce the risks of live food, or throw off the balance of an otherwise balanced diet by adding live foods.
So, all the fish in the wild are suffering from malnutrition? Because someone doesn't magically insert vitamins into their food?
Properly raised feeders should never have a disease in them. They should also be appropriate animals. For example, live foods my bichirs have had: ghost shrimp, frogs, earthworms, insect larvae, and smelts. The smelts aren't fed live, but have been frozen.
In these foods you get: eggs, stomach, brain, skeleton, heart, liver and other organs, plus whatever the feeder ate before being eaten. A lot of these ingredients are added through bone meal and other meals to the fish food. I think the naturally occuring organ would be much healthier then the boiled down mass.
I'm not saying pellets aren't nutritionally complete, I feed about half pellets to my fish. But saying that your fish are doomed to death for feeding live is completely ridiculous. If that was true they wouldn't exist in the first place. And neither would we.
Also, if you had ever fed live, you would definately know the benefit from excersize. When I feed pellets, the fish come to the front and sit in one spot munching the food. When I feed living prey, they may spend hours searching for it in the tank before actually catching their fill.
Properly raised feeders should never have a disease in them. They should also be appropriate animals. For example, live foods my bichirs have had: ghost shrimp, frogs, earthworms, insect larvae, and smelts. The smelts aren't fed live, but have been frozen.
In these foods you get: eggs, stomach, brain, skeleton, heart, liver and other organs, plus whatever the feeder ate before being eaten. A lot of these ingredients are added through bone meal and other meals to the fish food. I think the naturally occuring organ would be much healthier then the boiled down mass.
I'm not saying pellets aren't nutritionally complete, I feed about half pellets to my fish. But saying that your fish are doomed to death for feeding live is completely ridiculous. If that was true they wouldn't exist in the first place. And neither would we.
Also, if you had ever fed live, you would definately know the benefit from excersize. When I feed pellets, the fish come to the front and sit in one spot munching the food. When I feed living prey, they may spend hours searching for it in the tank before actually catching their fill.
I am not saying they are all doomed to die. I am saying that even the best attempt at recreating nature is doomed to fall short. Your mix is better than most, but even then it is not going to recreate nature. Even worse are the usual foods that most people use and think of when discussing live foods. These are even further from natural and far from healthy feeder animals.
Even the best cared for animals will be carrying pathogens of some kind, none of them are sterile.
I do not think that live frogs, earthworms, etc. are any better than pellet nutritionally. Again, an assortment of mainly protein sources but not nutritionally complete or balanced.
Nature is not ideal. It is true that live foods in nature are not supplemented, but it is also true that almost all animals die in nature well before reproduction, in part due to nutrition. If your goal is to mimic nature than buy 100 bichirs and feed them poorly. The ones who somehow live through it are the ones the best adapted to those conditions and would probably also survive in nature.
To fool yourself into thinking that an assortment of live foods is somehow more natural or better than a high quality pellet may be harmful to your fish.
The goal of any diet should be complete and balanced nutrition. The safest and most effective way to get to that point is with a high quality pellet.
Here is an article I wrote on why nature is not always ideal.
http://www.aquaticcommunity.com/*************/showthread.php?t=12603&highlight=nature+ideal
Even the best cared for animals will be carrying pathogens of some kind, none of them are sterile.
I do not think that live frogs, earthworms, etc. are any better than pellet nutritionally. Again, an assortment of mainly protein sources but not nutritionally complete or balanced.
Nature is not ideal. It is true that live foods in nature are not supplemented, but it is also true that almost all animals die in nature well before reproduction, in part due to nutrition. If your goal is to mimic nature than buy 100 bichirs and feed them poorly. The ones who somehow live through it are the ones the best adapted to those conditions and would probably also survive in nature.
To fool yourself into thinking that an assortment of live foods is somehow more natural or better than a high quality pellet may be harmful to your fish.
The goal of any diet should be complete and balanced nutrition. The safest and most effective way to get to that point is with a high quality pellet.
Here is an article I wrote on why nature is not always ideal.
http://www.aquaticcommunity.com/*************/showthread.php?t=12603&highlight=nature+ideal
reptileguy2727;5119249; said:
idk man i've seen some pretty sausage-like pellet fed bichirs on here but never that chunky wild caught, in the wild food isn't always readily available so for a fish to be able to eat so much probably reduces their life expectancy to an extent
I have 2 ornate bichirs in my 120 gal Africa cichlid tank. They feed on pellets, frozen and freeze dried foods. They also take any number of live worms that I offer. My Africans are also prolific breeders and occasionally they catch and eat a baby cichlid.
