Hi all,

I'm a newbie to all this - fish tank for 2 months.

I have had trouble with my water in the past but everything is now getting back to normality.

Please can someone tell me exactly how much and howoften I should feed my fish.

I have flake, sinking pellets and frozen blood worm. I tend to put 2 sinking pellets and flake (just enough for it all to be consumed within 1 1/2 minutes) daily and a small cube of blood worms 2-3 times a week. Does this seem about right? The instructions on the flake tin suggest feeding 2-3 times a day. I think that this seems to much and I am worried about waste and poluting the water again?

I have a 125L tank with tetra's, neon's, gourami's, mollies and a couple of loach.

I would appreciate any expert advice available.

Thankyou - Mark (England)

PS Has anyone got any advice for keeping algae at bay?

Hi your pretty good right now with the fish food , to keep algae at bay why don't you buy some bristlenoses they are the beast to get rid of algae but you could try those chemicals to get rid off algae

there's a few sure signs of overfeeding which can help you identify it.

snails - everyone gets the odd snail from time to time, they come in on plants and some of them are beneficial, but if the population is uncontrollable then it means there's too much uneaten food in the water, if there's a food source the population will expand until it consumes all the food, if the food levels drop off the population will drop too. so if you've loads of snails, chances are you're overfeeding, gradually cut back until you see a population drop in the snails.

fish sluggish at feeding time - if your fish don't seem all that bothered when you feed them then you're feeding too much, it should be total frenzy for a few minutes when you drop food in, cut back feeding until you get this

algae could also be tied in to feeding too much, here's my best basic explanation of algae

to get plants to grow you need lights, nutritents and Co2. obviously the lights are extra equipment although if the tank is in direct sunlight this will contribute too. There will be some nutrients in the water (think of the fishy poop as compost) and there is naturally some Co2 in the water anyway.

algae will also grow when the three things above are in good supply. algae is less demanding than plants. If you imagine quantifying the lights, nutrient and Co2 so for example you had 5 units of lighting, 4 units of nutrient and 3 units of Co2. your plants would use up the 3 units of Co2, 3 units of nutrients and 3 units of lighting, because there's only 3 units of Co2 they can't use the excess light and nutrients. The algae can grow without having lots of all 3 in place so they will use the extra units of lighting and nutrients and as such you'll get algae growth.

now it doesn't really work like that in practice, you can't always easily quantify the levels you have and different species of plants and algae will have different requirements. but it serves as an example to explain the theory.

so amongst those fishkeepers who are serious about plants they normally go down one of two routes

they either provide so much of all 3 that the plants grow so fast and use so many nutrients that the algae doesn't get a look in, or they provide a low level of all of them, then the plants use it all and you just get steady slow growth. really the second option is what most average fishkeepers aim for.

in short what i'd recommend you do is get a good few bunches of plants in there, if you find you're getting a lot of algae growth try turning the lights on for fewer hours a day. it's a bit of a balancing act really but just tinker with things and you should find a happy medium where you just get a little bit of algae (cos really, we all get some).