Good Saltwater Foods (not frozen)

[Boundava]

I have had a saltwater tank and now that it is established I wanted to look into getting some dried foods to feed along with the frozen foods.

My 38 gallon currently has a damsel fish, a bicolor blenny, 2 chalk bass, a dragon goby a pitho crab and emerald crab. Also hav an assortment of mushroom corals, a gorgonian coral and a flower anenome.

I feed the corals and anenome Reef Roids.
The fish get frozen cyclops, rotifers and San Francisco Bay reef plankton.

For the crabs I throw in some Hikarii algae wafers and nori dried seaweed.

Have a new job so would like to set up my Eheim feeder to dose some dry food mid day. Any recommendations for good quality dry food would be welcomed.

 

[Donya]

The biggest issue with flake food is rarely the exact brand, but that fish used to eating frozen can be very difficult to train to flake. IME damsels are easy to train, but others can be hit and miss. If you can simply change when the tank is fed and keep the same overall diet, that will likely have less of an impact on water quality if your fish reject the flakes.

Personally I have used omega one marine flakes for years, including with auto feeders, and more recently ocean nutrition flakes then a bit of vitalis flakes based on availability. I'm not especially partial to any one of those brands over the others. Two of my most recent fish don't recognize any flakes as food despite being tank bred, so I switched back to frozen and have been training them slowly over time to PE pellets as a backup option, which they eat more readily and which in my tanks have been less likely to get sucked down a filter tube immediately compared to uneaten flakes (but I also have a substantial CUC to eat any that sink completely).

 

[Boundava]

The biggest issue with flake food is rarely the exact brand, but that fish used to eating frozen can be very difficult to train to flake. IME damsels are easy to train, but others can be hit and miss. If you can simply change when the tank is fed and keep the same overall diet, that will likely have less of an impact on water quality if your fish reject the flakes.

Personally I have used omega one marine flakes for years, including with auto feeders, and more recently ocean nutrition flakes then a bit of vitalis flakes based on availability. I'm not especially partial to any one of those brands over the others. Two of my most recent fish don't recognize any flakes as food despite being tank bred, so I switched back to frozen and have been training them slowly over time to PE pellets as a backup option, which they eat more readily and which in my tanks have been less likely to get sucked down a filter tube immediately compared to uneaten flakes (but I also have a substantial CUC to eat any that sink completely).

Thank you! I was going to use pellets versus flakes as even with my fresh water I don't like to feed them flakes. I'm going to give the Marine pellets from New Life Spectrum a try. Wish there was a frozen food dispenser...