How Often Should I Feed My Fish?

[Deleted member 55926]

The back of the tub says 2-3 times a day, as much as the fish will eat in a few minutes.

I understand that I don't want excess food lying around the tank, but how do I know how much is enough? How do you know when a fish is full? It's like they will eat forever! Is it OK if I feed them in the morning before work, and in the evening when I come home?

 

[drobbyb]

Disregard what the tub says. They want you to buy more food for your fish. Once a day is plenty.

 

[waterdrop]

As a beginner, your first week with fish, just take the same kitchen timer or wristwatch you use to time your water tests and go ahead and set it for 3 minutes. Then feed your fish small amounts (it doesn't take much to put in more than they can handle at one time and then just get a feel for the size pinches and how many it takes to get you to 3 minutes when you have to stop. It will often feel way too soon. The fish will often seem still quite hungry from your point of view, but stop at the 3 minutes. "How much the fish can consume in 2 to 3 minutes, once a day," is the best of the most general feeding advice we usually seen given to beginners here on TFF in my experience.

After you've used the timer for a week your feel for how to judge it will be much better and will keep improving if you occasional do a timing check on yourself and make sure you haven't let the amount creep up. And of course when you find you've accidently forgotten to feed them one day, just consider that to be fine and don't feed them at all that day. That's more realistic to what they get in the wild and will be better for them.

Let me repeat that this is -general- advice and as your experience as a fishkeeper grows (through reading or local tropical fish society conversations or other experiences) you will definately gain more details about feeding specific species in better ways if you have the time and inclination. Some very small fish can indeed benefit from very, very small feeding twice a day, but its not essential. All fish can benefit from variety of food choice if its done with knowledge of the species and of the food offered. Two popular foods need a bit of advice: live or frozen brine shrimp can be a nice "treat" but be aware that from a nutritional standpoint they are like "candy" and should only be fed very occasionally. Likewise, bloodworms are a very rich food and should be only sparingly offered or they can cause digestion problems. On the positive side, you will see good discussions here on TFF about feeding the occasional vegatables and these are a good and healthy occasional change too. You can find the food discussions easily and the members have a wealth of other infobits in them.

Good grief, I've gone on and I doubt you are reading this my now, lol, so I'll mercifully quit!

 

[drobbyb]

Waterdrop, I like the way you explained all that. Since I have been feeding fish for so long, I took it for granted and assumed that a newcomer would already have an idea of how to feed fish. Thanks for the lesson


There are some special circumstances where you might feed twice a day, or in some cases, every other day. Ideally you would feed your fish tiny amounts several times a day to simulate their natural feeding behavior. In fact, when you are trying to get your fish into breeding condition, feeding several types of food (prepared, frozen, or live) 5 to 6 times a day will be in order.

I apologize for my hurried post earlier. I oversimplified the topic where I should have been more verbose.

 

[waterdrop]

Thanks Robby, I always like being a "scribe" if I can and trying to construct paragraphs out of the various bit of wisdom I read from you experienced fishkeepers. It hopefully allows people like you, who have kept lots of interesting fish, to add in the variations.

~~waterdrop~~
ps. I saw a whole tank of baby Bosmani Rainbows yesterday and at first I thought the lady had mislabeled them, they were SO different from when they get bigger. Really beautiful light yellow toward the back half and the fins have a different look in the little ones. These were kind of just past being called fry but still quite small.