I agree with the above...with one glaring exception. I believe that there is a single universal constant in fishkeeping, i.e. almost all fishkeepers overfeed.
Predators can be adapted to fewer, larger meals...so that's the way I like to feed them, but I don't carry it to extremes by trying to get every predatory fish to look like a Gulper Cat with a gigantic bulging belly. When they are still fry I will feed them more often, but after their first few weeks or months I start to slow down and offer less. My Jelly Cat at around 18 inches has slowed down substantially in rate of growth, and gets a decent feeding every 2 or 3 days; "decent" in this case means around 8 Massivore pellets or equivalent. Perhaps once a month, one of his meals will be larger, perhaps a single frozen/thawed fish large enough to create a noticeable bump. Even those meals are still small enough that they are seized and swallowed almost instantaneously; the fish never gets a giant food item that requires him to spend several minutes, or even more than a few seconds, to swallow.
My Red Wolf is around 7 inches, also just a youngster but whose growth has also slowed drastically. He gets fed every 2 or 3 days, about the equivalent of 1 or 2 Massivores. He gets much more during the late summer, when large grasshoppers are in abundance, but a seasonal feast like that is probably very similar to feast-or-famine fluctuations in nature as well.
Most fish are feeding in nature throughout the day, especially grazers and other vegetarians, so in those cases I want to feed several times a day if possible, but again in only very small quantities. I do not want to see piles of food sitting around on the bottom at all; there are too many pics seen of tanks that seem to have substrate and uneaten food in about equal quantities. When those aquarists are called on this, they often respond with comments about coming back the next day to clean up the extra food. Next day? If I see uneaten food in drifts on the bottom, it means the top came off the food canister and too much was dumped in
; any excess will be cleaned up...by me!...within 10 minutes, tops.
Another thing that many seem to overlook is tankmates. If you have a relatively slow feeder housed with voracious fast-moving tankmates, you could feed small quantities 6 times a day and the sluggard might never get anything if his tankmates beat him to it each time, which is not uncommon. Some people attempt to compensate by overfeeding...they drop in so much food that the speedsters can't eat it all, allowing the slower guys to scarf up a few pellets. As a short-term solution I suppose this is better than nothing, but...feeding so much at each meal that they literally can't eat it all, just so a couple of shy eaters are able to get any at all, is a pretty sad way to take care of your fish. Much better to put some thought into tank stocking so that there is not such a huge disparity in feeding style and speed.
do they mean that as a total of 1 minute spread between two feeds, or 2 feeds of one minute (which seems like a lot)?
