Vacations and fish feedback

[GaryE2]

I just returned from 12 days away, with my fish living a totally unsupervised life. I turned off some lights, and locked the door on a fishroom with 50 tanks and a few hundred fish. It's what I always do.

Before I left, I fed normally but didn't skip a day during the week as I usually do. I did my usual set of weekly 30% water changes 2 days before we departed. I didn't feed heavily. Fish are cold blooded and don't need to burn energy to stay warm, so they eat less than we would need. But like us, their health is harmed by excess body fats, so you have to watch out.

I just did a jet lagged stumble from tank to tank, feeding everybody. My losses? A few Pelvicachromis pulcher (common krib) fry spawned not long before we left. That's a shame, but I could never have raised that many, and I still have a good bunch. No other fish looked starved or unwell, although they sure tucked into the food today.

I'll do regular partial water changes later in the week when I've caught up on regular life, and simply feed as per normal, with no extra. I'm not planning to eat my pet fish, so there's no "fattening them up". I just fall into my regular routine, and should have fish breeding within a week or so.

This way is safer than asking an inexperienced friend to possibly overfeed (all new fishkeepers overfeed) or using inefficient dissolving food blocks (they often compromise water quality as they dissolve). No automatic feeders malfunctioned. Life is good.

 

[TwoTankAmin36]

Many years ago I discovered a gent selling his entire fish room. He was a fairly well know cichlid breeder and his entire basement was filled with tanks from 20ls to a 220 and everything in between. He was about an hours drive from me. He had be forced to have major back surgery and could not longer continue with his fish keeping. I made a couple of trips there and I ended up buying a 150, 125, seveveral 33Ls and 20Ls. I also got filters including an Aquaclear 110 and a few smaller Aquaclears. A Fluval canister came with them and so did lids for all the tanks.

I got a bunch of other odds and ends including some flexible tinted hoses and egg crate plus a big sheet of almost rigid very coarse blue media. I had help picking up the 6 foot tanks and getting them into the house by=t two big strong guys who also had a pickup truck.

On my first visit I noticed almost all of the tanks were still stocked with fish. He wanted to sell them but it wasn noyt going well even though there were proven breeders and some rarer fish. He said he had stopped feeding some time ago. I was amazed because the fish were active and looked healthy. Unfortunately, I have never been a cuchlid keeper with 2 exception, angels, discus and and an African riverine cichlid. I was given a pair of "Pseudocrenilabrus nicholsi is a small mouth-brooding cichlid from the Democratic Republic of Congo" as I have always wanted to witness this spawning method.

My visits coverd about a 3 or 4 week period and he never fed the fish at all. And even when I went to fetch the big tanks, the fish still seemded to be doing well. What I learned from this was how long fish could go with out being actively fed. I have no clue as to how they did this what there might have been in the tank for them to eat. Maybe it was smaller fish.

My point here is that GaryE's exoerience was shorter term than I have witnessed fish manage to survivef or much longer than a dozen days of no food being added to a tank. In this case it was mutltiple tanks.