food specs... doing some reading this morning....

[Magnum Man]

I noticed these quotes on a food, that I've had on my watch list.... I've not tried them yet...

" KEEP A CLEANER TANK: Our Super Color Mini Pellets are naturally insoluble, which reduces water pollution, and they have significantly less starch, which reduces fish waste

• SUPERIOR QUALITY: No meals, hydrolysates, digests, or any other pre-processed protein"

If they are "naturally insoluble" to me that sounds like, they are harder to digest??? being as the fishes digestive system is fully emersed in water, I would think if they were soluble, they would be more easily digested??? thoughts???

 

[Magnum Man]

ingredients still have cereal grains... and the feed 3 times a day doesn't work with how I keep fish... hmmm feed them like Americans...

 

[GaryE]

I think the great lack in prepared fish foods is fibre. Algae, plants, fish, crustaceans, insects - all are fibrous foods to varying degrees. When Lake Malawi's 'aufwuchs' (plant matter/crustacean and algae) eaters came into the hobby, the death rates from bloating exposed a lot of then popular foods. Now we have Bettas bloating. It's the same old, same old. Insect exoskeltons aren't water soluble or digestible, but they aid digestion and bowel health.

You want food that can be digested, not dissolved. As for 4 times a day - the companies want money that can be pocketed, and the welfare of the fish doesn't natter to most food companies. The cheapest ingredients in the largest quantities will do that.

As much as possible, I try to avoid processed fish foods. They have their uses, but in combination.

 

[Colin_T]

ingredients still have cereal grains... and the feed 3 times a day doesn't work with how I keep fish... hmmm feed them like Americans...View attachment 372970

Keep the salmon, whole herring, whole shrimp, herring oil & kelp, and dump the rest, and you have a good food for predatory fishes.

If the wheat flour, wheat germ, wheat gluten, rice bran and pea protein were last, they would be in smaller amounts and less of an issue. But having them at the top of the ingredients list (3rd & 4th) means they are a bulking/ filler agent. The shrimp even comes after them. Since fish can't digest grains, it's kind of pointless having fish food with lots of grains/ flour in.

Having vitamin A in fish food containing whole fish is pointless. The whole fish will have plenty of vitamin A in. If the manufacturers were really concerned about the fish getting enough vitamin A, they could add betacarotene and it would improve red, orange and yellow colours in fish and provide them with all the vitamin A they can use and in a safe manor. You can store huge amounts of betacarotene in your body and it converts it to vitamin A as required. But if you have too much vitamin A, you get sick.

The vitamins (especially B vitamins) are going to break down rapidly in a humid environment so it probably won't be of any benefit once the container is open. The Astaxanthin might be helpful for blue colour in fish but the rest of it isn't really useful.

-----------------

I have used dry pellet fish foods that were really hard and didn't break down readily in water. The nitrates went just as high in the tanks that got those pellets as they did on other types of foods. The only good use I found for hard insoluble fish pellets was to use as baits in my fish traps when collecting fishes in the wild. The insoluble pellets would be used all day and still stay together.

 

[Rusty_Shackleford]

There will always be some sort of grain as a binder. The difference in prepared foods is do they use more grains than necessary as filler, and the quality of the main ingredients.

Much like feeding a capybara to your anaconda in your Amazon biotope aquarium, you want to feed whole prey items. So "fish meal" isn't always bad if it's from the whole fish.

 

[gwand]

What is the garlic for. Italian fish?

 

[GaryE]

What is the garlic for. Italian fish?

About every 10 years or so, there is a short fad for garlic as an ultimate natural miracle med in fishfood. The marketing is everywhere, then it's nowhere. So having garlic in there is good marketing for the next flare up, or leftover ingredients from the last.

It may or may not be useful, but if it did what the ads claim when it's "in", there'd be no kissing gouramis in the hobby.

 

[Magnum Man]

Can Freshwater Fish Eat Garlic? Benefits, Safety, And Myths For Your Aquarium [Updated On- 2025]

Freshwater fish can eat garlic. It enhances appetite and boosts the immune system. Use fresh garlic or garlic extract as fish food. Avoid high concentrations,

fishingandfish.com

 

[AJ356]

There will always be some sort of grain as a binder. The difference in prepared foods is do they use more grains than necessary as filler, and the quality of the main ingredients.
View attachment 372972
View attachment 372973
Much like feeding a capybara to your anaconda in your Amazon biotope aquarium, you want to feed whole prey items. So "fish meal" isn't always bad if it's from the whole fish.

I assume companies are not using the whole fish if they are stating fish meal? Or they would state whole fish? Or maybe not. But fish food companies probably know that 99% of fish keepers are probably clueless when it comes to fish food ingredients. Nearly every single most well known brand of fish food in the UK starts with fish meal as the main ingredient.

 

[Colin_T]

What is the garlic for. Italian fish?

to make the fish taste better

 

[GaryE]

Can Freshwater Fish Eat Garlic? Benefits, Safety, And Myths For Your Aquarium [Updated On- 2025]

Freshwater fish can eat garlic. It enhances appetite and boosts the immune system. Use fresh garlic or garlic extract as fish food. Avoid high concentrations,

fishingandfish.com

The article has an AI feel, and contradicts itself a bit. A few more "may" and "might" statements pop up at the end than at the beginning. But if garlic is as good as its proponents believe, there's no saying how much is in these foods.

There are no standards or regulations on fish foods, so gimmicks abound.

 

[fishorama]

When I made food for my discus grow outs, I used shrimp as a "binder", no grains. It seemed to help keep the other foods stick together a bit. I used people grade foods (clams, various fish, scallops & a bit of spinach, sometimes vitamins, garlic, etc). I thought astaxanthin (sp?) was for yellow coloring; my discus were yellow or gold based. Might be an old idea, that was 20+ years ago.

I try to buy prepared foods that have the 1st 3 ingredients actual fish products. Salmon, krill, shrimp, etc. Fish meal & byproducts are a bit iffier than I thought. There was a thread about them a couple months ago. I'll try to find it later.

Some "worm"-based foods like bloodworms, daphnia & soldier fly larva actually have quite a bit of fiber from chitin; also white worms & red wigglers.

 

[GaryE]

I am having great success right now with a homemade food as a staple. I have shrimp, black soldier fly larvae chicken 'treats', zucchini from the garden, astaxanthin, and spirulina, run though a meat grinder, flattened in sheets and frozen. I also have a version with no zucchini (courgette in the UK). Fish are eating it with gusto and it seems nutritional to me. I snap a piece off a few times a week, and alternate it with white worms, zucchini slices, fruit flies, artemia, bug bites, insect pellets and occasional flake, depending on the species.

There's no one size fits all, something I learned because I have long ape arms. The clothing rule also applies to fish foods.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

If you want to end the anecdotal reports and instead consider the science on this I suggest you go here: https://scholar.google.com/

The enter "Garlic in fish food" You should get "About 147,000 results (0.10 sec)" Of cpurse you cannot read them all but you can skimm through a few pages and get the gist of the general sentiment. Most of the ones I looked at in the first few pages were pretty pro-garlic and they explained why.

For GaryE

Afifah, D., Arief, M. and Al-Arif, M.A., 2021, February. The effect of garlic (Allium sativum) and turmeric (Curcuma longa) extract addition in commercial feed on feeding rate, feed efficiency and feed conversion ratio of gouramy fish (Osphronemus gouramy). In IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science (Vol. 679, No. 1, p. 012073). IOP Publishing.

Abstract​

Gouramy is known to it’s low appetite and slow growth. Attractants are ingredients that are mixed in small amounts of feed to increase feed intake, growth, and fish consumption of feed. Garlic contains at least 33 sulfur components that give a distinctive odor and various medicinal effects. Turmeric contains essential oils composed of monoterpenes and is an effective odor stimulating precursor compound used as an attractant. This study aims to determine the effect of giving turmeric and garlic extracts at different doses on feed consumption, feed efficiency and feed conversion ratio in gouramy. This study used an experimental method with 5 treatments; P0= control, P1=1% garlic extract addition, P2= 1.5% garlic extract addition, P3= 1% turmeric extract addition and P4= 1.5% turmeric extract additions with 4 replications using 10 fish in each.. The results showed that the highest feed consumption value was in the treatment of P1and P2, the lowest conversion ratio and the highest value of feed efficiency was found in the treatment of P2 and P3. So it can be concluded that the addition of 1.5% garlic extract or 1% turmeric extract is effective as an attractant and effective for increasing the growth of gouramy.

(edited to spell fish properly- DOH!)

 

[sharkweek178]

The only people who recommend multiple feedings per day for adult fish are the people who sell fish food.