Vegan /vegetarian fish food

[Backfromthedead]

Challenge accepted.

I am going to find a rescue pacu for my stock tank, and feed it nothing but fruits and veggies and see what happens.

I will do this just to piss all of you off and possibly prove you wrong. You know who you are.

 

[jjohnwm]

Challenge accepted.

I am going to find a rescue pacu for my stock tank, and feed it nothing but fruits and veggies and see what happens.

I will do this just to piss all of you off and possibly prove you wrong. You know who you are.

Cool!

Maybe you can rescue one from the OP...

 

[esoxlucius]

Cool!

Maybe you can rescue one from the OP...

That's not a good idea. They'd be suffering from severe malnutrition, it wouldn't make the journey, lol.

 

[Trouser Cough]

I am going to find a rescue pacu for my stock tank, and feed it nothing but fruits and veggies and see what happens.

You'd have a well nourished and supremely happy Pacu. They're primarily herbivorous and only opportunistic hunters.

 

[jjohnwm]

Ya know...the ideal experiment would be two identical tanks that are set up, maintained, water-changed and kept as similar as possible. Take two identical young pacus, or even groups of pacus, and introduce one to each tank.

I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. Feed the fish or group of fish in Tank A on an entirely veggie diet. Tank B is largely vegetarian as well but has a mere 10% of its diet consisting of earthworms, shrimp or even carnivore pellets. Trust me, you won't have any difficulty in getting them to eat the meat.

Compare the two fish or groups of fish after a year; length, weight, colour, general activity level. Maybe even get one of your more sensitive friends to ask them how "happy" they are.

Doesn't need to be pacus; could be Osphronemus gouramis, herbivorous cichlids like bocourti or pearsei, or just about any "herbivorous" fish you can come up with. Doesn't have to be 10% meat, pick whatever small percentage you like. Doesn't have to be one year, but pick a long enough time period for the results of pure vegetarianism vs good ol' omnivorism to be visible. I'll bet five years would be a real eye opener.

Should be interesting. I think the results might put a definitive end to this thread...which will probably still be going at the one year mark...

 

[Savethemall]

Well this isn't relevant to the original topic but you asked for it soooooo much..
So there you go..

A Look at Plant-Based Diets - PMC

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

A tiny bit from it-

Lifestyle Heart Trial examined the relationship between atherosclerosis and diet. In this study, patients with cardiac disease were switched from their standard omnivorous diets to either a plant-based diet or the American Heart Association Diet, which is the current standard of care dietary intervention. The study found that 34% more patients on the plant-based diet had reduction of atherosclerosis than those on the diet recommended by the American Heart Association.8

A meta-analysis featuring seven prospective cohort studies reviewed heart health in vegetarians vs. omnivores. The analysis concluded that those who do not consume meat have significantly lower rates of both ischemic heart disease and all-cause mortality.9

In a combined evaluation of five prospective analyses comparing omnivore vs. vegetarian rates of death from ischemic coronary disease, vegetarians were found to have 24% lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease than those who ate meat after controlling for factors such as smoking status, age, and gender.10

A recent experimental study swapped amateur athletes’ omnivorous diets to a vegan diet and studied the athletes’ cardiac structure via echocardiogram prior to and following the diet. This study suggested that actual structural remodeling of the heart can occur when switching from an omnivorous diet to a plant-based diet.11 This structural remodeling of the heart, albeit noted in healthy athletes, may play a role in the documented improvement of health in those with cardiovascular disease who adapt a plant-based diet.

An article based on clinical trials -

Plant-based diets are better for you, new study finds. Here are the health benefits

Vegetarian and vegan diets are linked to lower levels of cholesterol.

fortune.com

Another one-

The effects of plant-based diets on the body and the brain: a systematic review - Translational Psychiatry

Western societies notice an increasing interest in plant-based eating patterns such as vegetarian and vegan, yet potential effects on the body and brain are a matter of debate. Therefore, we systematically reviewed existing human interventional studies on putative effects of a plant-based diet...

www.nature.com

And here is one that dosent say it all good:

Plant-based diets and long-term health: findings from the EPIC-Oxford study | Proceedings of the Nutrition Society | Cambridge Core

Plant-based diets and long-term health: findings from the EPIC-Oxford study - Volume 81 Issue 2

www.cambridge.org

And the athletes-

20 vegan athletes whose success is fuelled by a plant-based diet

Think athletes need meat for muscle? Think again! These successful vegan athletes are actually plant-based and at the top of their game!

www.veganfoodandliving.com

Vegan Athletes: 15 Top Athletes on a Plant-Based Diet

Healthy nutrition is important, which is why more and more athletes are turning to plant-based alternatives. ISPO.com presents fifteen vegan athletes and their stories.

www.ispo.com

And I want also to say something about this... to me it sounds wrong to divide vegan and omnivores diets and then check which one is better... I think that there are millions of way to consume vegan diets and million ways to consume omnivore diets. And under those headlines, are the choices that will make it healthy or unhealthy...
A Vegan can be eating French fries, watermelons and white bread all day. Would he be healthy? Would he has a good chance to break sports records? And the same goes for carnivores... so honestly I brought those researches because you kinda asked for it.. but I dont like the way that they are written.
The main point that I do take from those , and would like other to consider , is that vegan diet has the potential to be anything that a carnivore omnivore diet has(except maybe just a bit less potential to destroy the world ).
It can be junky, it can be healthy, it can help loose or gain weight, it can be tasty, it can be lousy, it can be expensive or cheap, sophisticated or simple,diversed or monotonous,pretty,ugly ,boring or exciting.
Pretty much like vegans and omnivores themselves

 

[Savethemall]

Challenge accepted.

I am going to find a rescue pacu for my stock tank, and feed it nothing but fruits and veggies and see what happens.

I will do this just to piss all of you off and possibly prove you wrong. You know who you are.

Ya know...the ideal experiment would be two identical tanks that are set up, maintained, water-changed and kept as similar as possible. Take two identical young pacus, or even groups of pacus, and introduce one to each tank.

I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. Feed the fish or group of fish in Tank A on an entirely veggie diet. Tank B is largely vegetarian as well but has a mere 10% of its diet consisting of earthworms, shrimp or even carnivore pellets. Trust me, you won't have any difficulty in getting them to eat the meat.

Compare the two fish or groups of fish after a year; length, weight, colour, general activity level. Maybe even get one of your more sensitive friends to ask them how "happy" they are.

Doesn't need to be pacus; could be Osphronemus gouramis, herbivorous cichlids like bocourti or pearsei, or just about any "herbivorous" fish you can come up with. Doesn't have to be 10% meat, pick whatever small percentage you like. Doesn't have to be one year, but pick a long enough time period for the results of pure vegetarianism vs good ol' omnivorism to be visible. I'll bet five years would be a real eye opener.

Should be interesting. I think the results might put a definitive end to this thread...which will probably still be going at the one year mark...

Ok please dont.
If you are seriues about this then join me on the online searching.. if we will find enough evidence then it's possible to consider it ,but it will need to be more then just checking body weight.. you will need to do blood tests and so and evaluate organs function and immune system function as well . But not now,
not without nothing to be based on.. They dont deserve this...
And also.. a pack of pacus will need what like a 20k liter tank?

 

[FJB]

And this relevant to fish how?????

 

[jjohnwm]

Ok please dont.
If you are seriues about this then join me on the online searching.. if we will find enough evidence then it's possible to consider it ,but it will need to be more then just checking body weight.. you will need to do blood tests and so and evaluate organs function and immune system function as well . But not now,
not without nothing to be based on.. They dont deserve this...
And also.. a pack of pacus will need what like a 20k liter tank?

Relax, I'm most assuredly not serious about this. I don't need to do an experiment to show me that feeding a diet that is as close as possible to the diet an animal evolved to eat...is the best diet for that animal. I don't need to show experimental results in an effort to change your mind about veganism, since experimental results can almost always be skewed, spun, interpreted, re-interpreted, mis-interpreted and manipulated to apparently show just about anything.

But such an experiment is easy to carry out, and yet you seem to be aghast at the idea of doing so. You are concerned about the fact that a layman aquarist could not do blood tests and organ function comparisons and the host of other analysis types that you feel necessary.

But a much more grass-roots analysis could be done, by just about anyone with enough time. Perform the experiment with the species of your choice, but extend it for the life of the animal. Keep both groups until death. Single specimens would not be appropriate, it would require a group of animals for the comparison to get statistically valid results. Compare average life spans of the two groups. Compare breeding successes and failures.

This exact experiment has been going on for all species for millions of years. It's called "life". If veganism were actually the superior approach to nutrition...there would be a huge percentage of vegan life-forms everywhere we look in nature. But...there aren't. We can debate whether there are none at all, or simply very, very few, but that's splitting hairs. It isn't the natural way for animals to live, as evidenced by the fact that they don't live that way. It isn't an effective way to nourish animals, because so few of them obtain nourishment that way.

I don't fight nature in my aquarium keeping. If a fish didn't evolve to live in the water I have available to me...I pass on that species, in favour of other species that are suited to the type of water I have. If a fish requires high temperatures, I will either provide those temperatures or else simply not keep that fish...rather than having a heart to heart with it, trying to convince it that it will be more comfortable in cooler water, I will find other fish whose natural temperature range matches what I can provide. If a fish normally eats occasional large meals in nature, I won't feed it once daily just because it's cool to watch it eat; conversely, if a fish requires constant grazing all day long, I won't feed it once daily just because it happens to be more convenient for me.

Long and short...the fish evolved to live and eat in a certain fashion. It's the product of many thousands or millions of years of natural selection, resulting in an organism that is perfectly suited to fill its environmental niche. I will not presume to know enough about it to force it into an artificial niche that happens to be easier or cheaper or more convenient or more palatable for me.

You seem to feel that you do know enough to do that, or to at least try to do that. IMHO, you are wrong, pure and simple. In your own words: "They don't deserve this."

 

[thiswasgone]

T thiswasgone here is some recent literature suggesting exactly what you are saying is disingenuous ie pandas being carnivores surviving as herbivores:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)30395-1

And sourced from that same article, some literature suggesting the opposite of what you said earlier ie pandas are an evolutionary dead end:

Giant Pandas Are Not an Evolutionary cul-de-sac: Evidence from Multidisciplinary Research

The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) is one of the world’s most endangered mammals and remains threatened by environmental and anthropogenic pressure.

academic.oup.com

Sorry if this is too "red herring" for you. (Ha!)

I had written a longer post that was cut off due to me being unable to post it (idk if it was server issue or due the length of the post) but i'm not going to waste more time convincing you otherwise anymore after this post.

Giant pandas (ailuropoda melanoleuca) are genetic dead-ends. Being a genetic dead-end does not mean they are not a successful species for the environment they adapt in; this is factitious and the only main avenue people who support pandas have, mostly for funding purposes (China will never let this species die). Creatures such as ailuropoda melanoleuca are genetic dead-ends because their species have hyper-specialized into a singular food source which isn't bad in itself but they also regained their bear-like size within the last 1 million years. The most recent direct ancestors of ailuropoda melanoleuca adapted to include bamboo in their diets but were also closer to the size of foxes not bears; they were also omnivores. This difference in size was mainly due to the environment they developed in where large prey-items did not exist but a lot of bamboo did. As a result, when ailuropoda melanoleuca eventually branched off and evolved to specialize in eatting bamboo it also slowly gained the energy surplus to support larger species members as smaller ones would die to the jungle predators of that time.

Unfortunately this is also why they are doomed to die off. Ailuropoda melanoleuca is force to consume bamboo for about half a day if not more to simply survive. There are many herbivore species that have similar feed hours but most are both megafauna with no consistant natural predators as healthy adults, eat a varity of differnt plant matter, and/or are social creatures/live in packs. Most other herbivore are much smaller in size and eat multiple times a day at specific day light hours to avoid predation; they also tend to stick to packs of the same species or co-depend on other species for warning signs.

The only thing ailuropoda melanoleuca has going for it out of those three general criteria is the fact that they evolved back into medium-sized bears during a time no megafauna evolved to hunt large animmals in Asia's jungles (most apex predators during the pleistocene epoch hunted the megafauna on the plains) and specalized on a food source no other animal exclusively ate. This is evident based on the size they eolved back into, their native range before the last peak glacial cooling (~18,000 years ago), and how they retained a solitary lifestyle as a species; there was no evolutionary pressure to maintain herds nor breed beyond every 2 years. This can also be seen in other Asianic bears who evolved during that time period (sloth bears, asian black bears, etc.) as they also evolved into jungle niches although the asian black bear did retain a more omnivorious pallet (eat little of everything high in nutrients vs giant panda strategy of eat a lot of one thing low in nutrients). This makes them both vulnverable small long-lasting evnironmental changes and to predators (which they had none during their original evolutionary time period).

Unfortunately within the past 100,000 years modern tigers evolved to be jungle specalists and are known bear killers. Although not a majority of their diet through modern anaylsis, had humans not evolved and cut off their native range ailuropoda melanoleuca and other asian bears may have become a key prey item for a larger sub-species of tigers within the next few tens of thousands of years. At a birth rate of 1 cub every 2 years & being extremely unsocial animals, the evolution of a bear-killing tiger or any new large apex predator would have already put pandas on the path to death.

Additionally, their overreliance on bamboo means any disease or insect that also evolved to devour bamboo en masse would have resulted in major habitat loss regardless of humans. Even before that, giant pandas are extremely reliant on a consistent flowering pattern for multiple species of bamboo. If there is any major environmental disruption that could prevent the flowering of bamboo in a region it would result in a mass starvation and potentially die off of all giant pandas living there. Of course we can never know as humans have been the sole changer of nature but the results have been the same; a delayed extinction.