Have You Fed Your Fish Cooked Meat

[LakeyGal]

I keep hearing all sorts about varied diets and things and was just curious about what people have fed their fish, mine currently get the flakes, pellets, veggies and live or frozen food from the LFS.

This question mainly popped into my head as I am sat with a chicken drumstick and my Angelfish is staring at me in a very jealous way, which started me wondering if small bits of poached chicken (I'm thinking organic so no chemicals) would be too rich for my tropical fish.

More for info really so if anyone knows of any articles can you point me at em......ta

Apologies if this makes me sound daft....

 

[bubblesburst80]

i cant say wether this is a good or bad thing but i'm sure i remember reading about someone feeding their fish what they eat to a small degree, should get some interesting answers

xXx

 

[Bignose]

It's not really a question of richness, it is more of a question of the content of the chicken. Namely, fish diets -- as best evidenced by the list of ingredients on the fish food can -- are primarily fish. So, their digestive systems are designed to scavenge proteins from fish sources. Chicken, beef, and other terrestrial creatures have very different proteins in their meat than fish do. Now, when the fish eats proteins that it cannot put directly into use, they have to be broken down. The building blocks of protein are amino acids which can then be broken into nitrogenous waste -- namely ammonia. So, what happens with that non-native food is that a larger percentage of it is not converted into food, but into waste, and the waste processing organs, kidneys and liver, have to work harder than they are accustomed to.

What does all this mean in the long run? Well, if you give them that piece of chicken once in a great while, it will mean virtually nothing. But, chicken should not become part of the regular diet. If they eat too much of that non-native food, the kidneys will have to work very hard a lot of the time, and that will take its toll. But, the occasional 'treat' is fine.

 

[LakeyGal]

It's not really a question of richness, it is more of a question of the content of the chicken. Namely, fish diets -- as best evidenced by the list of ingredients on the fish food can -- are primarily fish. So, their digestive systems are designed to scavenge proteins from fish sources. Chicken, beef, and other terrestrial creatures have very different proteins in their meat than fish do. Now, when the fish eats proteins that it cannot put directly into use, they have to be broken down. The building blocks of protein are amino acids which can then be broken into nitrogenous waste -- namely ammonia. So, what happens with that non-native food is that a larger percentage of it is not converted into food, but into waste, and the waste processing organs, kidneys and liver, have to work harder than they are accustomed to.

What does all this mean in the long run? Well, if you give them that piece of chicken once in a great while, it will mean virtually nothing. But, chicken should not become part of the regular diet. If they eat too much of that non-native food, the kidneys will have to work very hard a lot of the time, and that will take its toll. But, the occasional 'treat' is fine.

Excellent, thanks for the reply..If there is no benefit then I might as well leave it..

....tho I wonder if when planning to add new fish to a tank pre-feeding the existing inhabitants a little of it would increase their waste making the filter bacteria multiply to keep up and consequently reduce the impact that then adding more fish would have on the bioload....not that I have any problem the regular way but it is a thought....

 

[Bignose]

Usually the problem is too much nitrogenous waste (ammonia), instead of not enough. Filter bacteria are very slow reproducers compared to most bacterial species. Most bacteria -- given sufficient nutrients, room to grow, i.e. perfect conditions -- double about once every hour. Some are as fast as 15 mins. But, the ammonia oxidizing and nitrite oxidizing bacteria as very slow comparatively; it takes over 20 hours to double even at tropical temperatures. So, the issue is almost always too much ammonia produced by the fish, rather than not enough causing the bacteria to starve.

 

[three-fingers]

That was an excellent post, just wondering, why is beef-heart considered a good fish food then?
I see discus keepers use it regularly all the time, I would imagine the heart is special in some way that makes it OK for fish?

Or is it actually just equally as bad an idea as a regular food like say, chicken?

 

[Bignose]

I am certainly no expert on discus, but I get the impression that it is filler. It would certainly contain the terrestrial proteins as opposed to the aquatic ones. One thing is that heart is almost wholly muscle, and very little fat, and fat is one of the things fish's kidneys and livers have to work very hard to process. The fat in fish are very different (I bet you've heard of the omega fatty acids, for instance).

But, it has been fed for a long time now, to discus, to piranhas, to a lot of fish. It is very common in the make-your-own-fish-food recipes. That said, just because it has been done a long time doesn't mean it is a good or healthy practice. But, I don't know for sure. I'm sure if you asked in the discus subforum that you'd get a lot of different opinions.