Fish Feeding

Do not overfeed your fish.

Fish are cold blooded and as such they only need food for energy and health. They do not needs huge amounts of food to heat their bodies like us. Your aquarium heater does that. Overfeeding is a common mistake and leads to unhealthy fish in dirty aquariums. I recommend feeding daily and have one day a week where you don't feed them at all. If your fish are hungry at feeding time and visibly excited, this is a good sign that you have healthy fish.

Try and give them a bit of variety in their diet. Buy them a few different food types and mix it up. Over the course of a week, I recommend 5 days of various dry foods, 1 day of frozen or live food. The dry foods are packed with nutrients, but live food and frozen live food are a great source of protein and they love it. It is not good to give too much live/ frozen food as it makes a mess and dirties the tank and doesn't contain good balanced nutritional content.

The instructions on fishfood packets usually says to give them as much as they will eat in a few minutes several times a day. I believe this is wrong! Fish will eat an enormous amount in a few minutes and feeding this much will lead to dirty aquariums and unhealthy bloated fish. The manufacturors of food clearly have a vested interest in you using more food. Once a day as much as they eat in one minute will usually be fine.

Some fish like small amounts blanched lettuce or spinach or pieces of cucumber. Do not leave these in the tank though. Remove the remains after 1 hour.

You may well need to use different types of food for different fish. For example your bottom dwelling catfish will not feed on flake. It can be hard to get the right food to the right fish. I recommend using the following tactic. Feed bottom dwellers first and let their pellets or wafers sink to the bottom. Delivery through a piece of filter tube to the bottom can be useful to stop your fiesty middle dwellers stealing it before it reaches the bottom. Next very quickly feed the middle top dwellers, to distract them from stealing the bottom dwellers food.

Depending on your fish, you may need to device other tactics to get the right food to the right fish. It can be funny to watch, but if middle dwelling fish get hold of catfish wafers a game of fishtank rugby often ensues.

Blocks of frozen live food are best delivered by half filling a glass with tank water, dropping in the food blocks and leaving for 10 minutes to thaw. Give it a stir to break up all the bloodworm, brineshrimp or whatever and then poor into the tank. The act of filling a glass in the tank sends my fish into a frenzy of excitement.