Is Your Fish Hungry ???

Is Your Fish Hungry?

This blog is an attempt to help aquarium keepers to understand what,when and how to feed their fishes is when they are hungry so that they don`t eat their co-living brothers and sisters in the Aquarium. 

Many at times I have noticed when it comes to buying food for ourself, we are very selective and be it buying vegetables or choosing a restaurant, we are very particular that we get fresh with good quality. I may want to insist on the same when it comes to feeding your fish and thats the purpose of this blog also throughout this blog, I might compare our food habits often with feeding your fishes for easy understanding(hopefully you are not going to order for a pizza for your fish after reading this).

So let`s start with few basics about the types of fishes feed which you may commonly find in the market and identifying the right feed by the end of this, ideally. Fish feeds are basically manufactured based on the feeding habit of the fishes. For an example, some of the fishes come to the water surface and feed. Some of them don`t come to the top surface at all. Some of them eat only at the bottom level of the tank. This specific habit of the fishes determine the type of food they can intake. 

1. Flake Food

2. Pellets Food

3. Freeze/Dried Food

4. Frozen Food

5. Spirulina/ Dried Sea Weed

6. Live Food

7. Other type food.

Flake Food

Flake Food is the most common of all fish foods and is generally the easiest to use. You simply sprinkle a little over the top of your water and the fish come up to feast! A variety of flakes are available for specific fish. Marine flake is designed for a saltwater fishes' diet, while community tropical flake is for freshwater fish like tetras, barbs, or angels. Goldfish have their very own flake, as well as cichlids. The ingredients within each flake were chosen based on the natural diet of each type of fish. A flake food is a great basic staple food for all fish, each according to its type.

Pellets

Pellets come in a variety of sizes but most are for larger fish. Cichlid pellets are common, as well as pellets for larger predatory fish like catfish or sharks. Pellets contain the same basic ingredients as flake foods, just in a different form. Some pellets are designed to float,while others will slowly sink to feed bottom-dwellers. Try pellets for your larger fish, like Oscars, catfish, large cichlids, groupers, etc.

When we talk about pellets, we also have to understand the different sizes of the pellets. What I have listed below is on the whole digits but there .5 variance, like 3.5mm or 4.5mm are also available from different manufactures.

1. 3mm

2. 4mm

3. 5mm

4. 6mm

5. 8mm

Freeze-Dried

Freeze-dried foods are a great supplemental food, an excellent alternative to live food that can carry diseases. This type of food is all-natural, usually in whole form. They have plenty of nutritional value and flavor that your fish will crave. Available varieties include krill,plankton, bloodworms, and other fish favorites. All fish will eagerly feed on freeze-dried foods, though give sparingly, not as their primary diet.

Frozen

Fish go crazy for frozen food! If you have a finicky eater, try some natural frozen food- it is sure to get them to nibble! Like freeze-dried food, frozen food is in its natural form, with varieties ranging from brine shrimp, krill, mysis, and other basics, to nutritious specialty blends created for specific fish, like Discus formula or Shark formula. Frozen food will be your fishes' favorite! Feed as a supplement to their regular staple diet. A perfect alternative to live food!

Spirulina/Dried Seaweed

Spirulina is a highly nutritious algae that many fish love. It's great for herbivorous cichlids and saltwater fish like clownfish and tangs.Seaweed is available as dried sheets.  Tangs,

 cichlids and plecos will love this veggie snack. Feed spirulina as part of their regular diet, and feed seaweed as a weekly treat.

Live Food

Live fish food include earthworms, sludge worms, water fleas, bloodworms, and feeder fish. Food for larvae and young fish include infusoria (Protozoa and other microorganisms), newly hatched brine shrimp and microworms. These are the most preferred type of food for fishes,but are difficult to get. However, freeze dried forms of earthworms, tubifex etc. are available now.

Other Foods

Many fish will appreciate a leaf of romaine lettuce every now and then, and goldfish & plecos would love a slice or two of cucumber! Pacus enjoy frozen peas and lima beans. Your larger carnivores may appreciate frozen beefheart or perhaps frozen squid or silversides. Some fish eagerly feast on earthworms, mealworms, and even crickets! Pufferfish and loaches love to crunch a few snails, too! 

Now lets talk about the ingredients of these fish foods...

Fish food should ideally provide the fish with fat (for energy) and amino acids (building blocks of proteins) and the fish food (whether flake or pellet) must be speedily digested in order to prevent build up of intestinal gas, renal failure and infections (such as swim bladder problems and dropsy) and to avoid aquarium pollution due to excessive ammonia. Aquatic diets for carnivores must contain vegetable matter such as spirulina.

While we are talking about the fish feed we may also wanted to know the sources for the fish food. 

1. Fish meal

2. Soybean meal

3. Squid meal

4. Whole Wheat

5. Shrimp

6. Brine Shrimp

7. Spirulina

What we may want to remember always is that the unconsumed food turns into ammonia in the aquarium and pollute the water which will eventually start affecting the fishes by either by reducing their life span or by killing them directly. So we will also talk about the right way of feeding the fishes below..

Now I guess we have had enough details about the food where its time to understand what to feed to whom, how much and when. Before we go further, let`s understand that fishes don't need to be fed mandatorily three times a day like human. They probably may not appreciate us providing them breakfast, lunch and dinner with evening tea. I remember hearing from many of my customers that whenever they go near to the tank, fishes are coming up for the food so they don't feel like walking away without feeding them. Watchout, may be they are coming up because you have overfed them and the uneaten food which has polluted and reduced the oxygen content of the water.

The key for the healthy fishes is good quality food but not large quantity. Keep this formula as a benchmark to identify the food requirement of your fish.  1kg fish fed at 1% of body weight per day. Now, i just don't even want to imagine a goldfish on a weighing scale. Its pretty simple, try feeding less quantities where your fishes can finish them with in 2 to 3 mins of time. Just in case if you have a community tank where some of the fishes eat away all the food and some of them don't get anything, then you would want to re-feed till the dominating ones exhaust and the submissive ones gets their share. Also there are possibilities few of your fishes may not come to the surface to eat. For those ones, you may want to choose sinking pellets so that they can feed on them.

Its always recommended to switch off the pump before you start feeding because there are possibilities the food may get sucked or blowed by the pump before your fishes feed on them. But just remember to switch on the pump right after the feeding without fail else it lead to a disaster. Once you finish feeding, make sure to remove the uneaten food using a fine net to avoid it polluting the aquarium. If you start maintaining the feeding timing on a regular basis, your fishes shouldn`t be taking more than few minutes to finish their feeding. 

While you are buying food for your fishes, please do consider the quantity vs cost. If you are getting a pack of 100gm food at a cost of 25 rupees, you might want to think about the quality that can contain considering the ingredients mentioned above on this article. There are foods available for different breed of fishes such as Discus, Fighter, Tetra, Flowerhorn, Arowana, all types of cichlids, Parrot fishes, etc. These foods are made with extra care considering the type and the need of the specific varieties of fishes. Incase if you are having just few goldfishes, there are specific food for them too. In my opinion, i would recommend to go for the specialized feed for the type of fishes you have rather than buying a generalized feed that may not be suitable for any of the fishes in your tank. 

A good quality food at the right quantity is very critical for the fishes to stay healthy with bright colour for a long period. You may log on to my site www.fishaway to have a look at the different types of feed available for online sale and I am sure you will be surprised to see the variants. 

I wonder if i have helped you to take you to the next level of maintaining your fishes but apart from reading this article and understanding it, what requires more is the conscious to provide good food to your fishes. Eating Biryani three times a day and eating noodles at all your meals, both are unhealthy. If you don`t spend on good food, then you may spend on medicines or on buying new set of fishes, Soon!

If you are reading this line, then i am sure you would have already on the look out for the right food for your fishes. Congratulations and i am happy for your fishes. Please do leave your comments and feel free to post questions if you have any.

Little Help To Start An Aquarium Keeping Hobby

Kick Start Your Hobby                                  

This article is about setting up a domestic aquarium at home and this is purely a guideline and not a rule book. Well, if this works then you learn to begin a new hobby successfully and if this doesn’t work for any reasons, you know what not to do to begin with.

Choosing the Aquarium Tank

For a beginner, I would recommend to go with a 2 feet tank. Standard size would be 2 ft length (length refers to your left hand to right hand) and 1 ft width (from you to the Wall) and 15 inches height.  The word Standard refers to the sizes that maintain aqua-dynamics of the water to help the fishes swim comfortable. It’s nothing but the equal share of water pressure all across the tank so that life is easy for the living.

While you are choosing the tank, you may face two major options in the current market. An imported aquarium, mostly China made and the assembled aquarium, made by us. The new trend is to have the front corners of the aquarium bend but not sharp, like the traditional way. These aquariums mostly comes as a plug and play types. Means, they have a wooden cabinet/stand to keep the aquarium tank, then the top filters and aquarium lighting. It makes the life easy for the customers who are busy with their routines because they don’t have to spend time on setting each of these components. Besides the aquarium tank is moulded on three sides and bottom and the back glass is stuck, which gives a better finishing and to add to the looks, there are plastic beading all around the edges to also ensure the compactness and strength. This also helps in avoiding your touch with the sharp edges of the glass.

When you buy an imported aquarium, over three feet long, ensure it has two motors on either side for the better water circulation and cleaning of dirt. Just one motor on end may not be powerful enough to pull the dirt all the way from the other end. Though you have an option of using a powerful motor but that may result in making the fishes feel uncomfortable for swimming due to the pressure.

Advantage of an assembled aquarium is it can be customised according to your requirement. Because most of the imported tanks comes I the standard size. Also in the assembled aquarium, you get to choose the type of filtration, designs of tops and lighting. Filters could be a canister type, UG filter, Top filter, Submersible filter or external hang on filter. Tops are available in different models like house type, castle, Chinese roof, dragon, etc made in wood or a specific material called sun board. Lightings could be LED or different colours of aquarium tubes and submersible lights.

Clean the tank thoroughly with the scrub and remove the residues of the silica which would have accumulated during the making of the tank. This can be done by pouring a little quantity of water inside the tank and rinsing it or using a wet sponge and cleaning the interiors of the tank. Once the tank is cleaned, you can start with you aquascaping of the aquarium. Ignoring the technical terminology used. This is nothing but decorating your aquarium using rock stones or pebbles stones, plastic plants and toys etc. Carefully choose the materials which are of decent quality and suits the type of fishes you gonna keep in the tank.

Choosing the Interiors.

This varies for fish families or varieties. For an example, cichlids, which are river based fishes, require rough stones in the tank so that they can rub themselves to get rid-off the old scales. They must do that in order to have new shiny scales. At the same time when you have decided to keep fish varieties line gold, molly and guppy, you can use the moulded surface stones like pebbles to add beauty to the aquarium.

I normally recommend polished white pebbles of medium size (I mean a 1 to 1.5 inches diameter as medium size) to be used because this makes your cleaning easy and white colour works as a indicator to the timing to clean your tank. Also the light reflection on the white colour helps your fishes to look brighter.

Choose the plastic plants according the height of the aquarium. Normally these plants are available from 4 inch height onwards. Very small plant inside a tall tank may look odd. Also you have different types of plants available like, carpet type, grass type, bush type, etc.  Don’t over crowd the tank but to have limited numbers to add to the beauty.

Coming to toys, if you choose to have in case if there are children at home who may enjoy the air bubbles and designs, there are lots of designs and models are available.

Remember, we are talking about only tropical fresh water aquariums where marine aquarium or planted aquarium will need different interiors since the nature of the fishes are different.

Getting the Tank Ready.

Once you complete the interiors of the Aquarium, you are good to fill the water. Normally I suggest to go with well or bore well water but in case you have Cavery (specific to Bangalore residents) then make you sure you use chemicals to remove the chlorine content in the water. There are a list of chemicals available in the market which can effectively clean the water. However you ensure that you follow this process so that you don’t end up killing the fishes.

Do not attempt to use any RO water or the purified drinking water because they may have been treated with chemicals which could be harmful to the fishes. Also once the tank is filled with water; make sure that you run the motor for a good 2 to 3 hours to have the it oxygen enriched. May be if you have a 5 ft aquarium filled with water which does not have sufficient oxygen in it could turn to be a possible killing machine, which I have already experienced in the past.

Just to add some spice, let me tell you a little experience of mine. We had a customer ordered for a 5 feet aquarium tank for his Arowana. When we delivered the tank, he also requested the delivery buy to fill the tank with water and shift the fish which is little over one foot long. So the boy filled the tank with the water of approximately 400L and shifted the fish into it. With-in seconds the fish collapsed and started floating with his head up. Wondering client called me for help to have a look at the fish. When I reached there, looking at the fish, I only had one question to them; what’s your water source. In a few minutes I have learned that they have a bore well and do not have over head tank. They fill the water from the bore well directly into the tank and transferred the fish. Expecting to have sufficient oxygen in a water coming from a 400 feet long bore well of 5 inches diameter was the stupidity which has happened there.

Immediately I have made arrangements to shift the fish to my storage tank at my place, in few minutes I could see the fish is swimming happily. Hope you got the learning from my experience.

Few more to look at…

Now, your Aquarium is almost ready to accept the fishes however there are few other factors you may want to notice before you add the fishes to it. Most importantly an aquarium heater, to maintain the temperature inside the aquarium. Most specifically in a city like Bangalore where the atmospheric temperature fluctuate drastically in a day is gonna be dangerous to the fishes. They prefer 28 to 30 degrees centigrade to stay warm. To maintain the temperature, placing a suitable aquarium heater is the best choice. This is also applicable to the aquariums kept in the air-conditioned room or office/commercial space. I refer suitable to the watt capacity of the heater. You may find these heaters available from 50W to 300W in multiples of 50s. Depending on your aquarium size, you can choose the right heater. For an example, if your aquarium size is 3ft in length and 18 inches in width and 18 inches in height, you may wanna use a 200W heater at least to keep the water warm.

One good thing about the new generation heaters is, they come with an auto-cut mechanism which prevents them from working continuously and overheating.

While choosing the heater, you may encounter another challenge where some of them would refer you to choose according to the water capacity of the aquarium but not the size. In that case all you need to do is to multiply the length, width and height in centimetres and divide the answer by 1000. For an example if your aquarium size is as I mentioned above then the calculation is going to be;

 91 (3 feet length) X 45 (18 inches width) X 45 (18 inches height) /1000 = 184 Litres.

So your 3 feet aquarium water capacity is 184 litres. In case if you are purchasing an aquarium heater made in western countries you may have to convert the litres into gallons. And the conversion rate is

One US Gallon =3.8 Litres

One UK Gallon = 4.5 Litres.

I guess now you are good to go with the knowledge of your aquarium to a great extent and also your aquarium is ready to have the fishes.

Choosing the Fishes.

Here comes the interesting part. Most of the times we mix fishes of our own interest who may not co-exist in the community tank because of their nature. Commonly aquarium sellers refer the varieties by the terms

“soft type” and “hard type”. This could be more for the easy understanding of the customer but I still wonder how these terminologies get fixed. What I find as some of the differences between so called SOFT and HARD varieties are, life span, size, hardiness and nature. If I may want to make a table on this, it may be like the one below;

Type	Life Span	Size	Hardiness	Nature
Soft Type	Short	Small	Less	Soft
Hard Type	Long	Large	More	Aggressive

You may want to note that this is just my observation on watching the fishes for years together but may not something I could technically prove.

Commonly the varieties in my observation like Gold, Guppy, Molly, Zebra Danios, Platy, swardtail, black ghost, most of the Barbs and angels live together happily. On the other hand varieties like Cichlids, morphs and carps would co-exist easily. Well, this is just a guideline not a thump rule because there are times I have observed things works strangely where a goldfish eating away a guppy.  In general what you may need to watch out is type of fish, similar size and health of the fish when you buy.

Complaints.

These are few standard complaints I hear from most of the customers off and on and I am going to try to list the most of them possible….

1.       My fishes are dead on the very next day….

Pretty simple..there could be two reasons. Either your aquarium is not completely ready when you load the fishes or the fishes you have bought are not healthy.

2.       My fishes start dying one after the other eventually I have an empty tank…

Sad !!!!  This may be because of the water, or could be of poor maintenance can also because of simple things like not maintaining the temperature or over feeding, etc. You may choose to fix the problems and restart your hobby or just find another way to make use of the aquarium tank in some other manner although I don’t recommend the second one.

3.       There are white spots on the fish`s body, fin or tail is missing (sometimes even an eye), wounded (in the war may be?), etc…

I may recommend you to run through my website  where I already have a link that says IS YOUR FISH SICK… (www.fishaway.in). This may help you to solve the issues to a great extent but in case if this doesn’t help, then get to a Vet to handle the situation.

4.       My aquarium is leaking/cracked…

Very limited options you have…if there is a leakage then possibly can be taken care with little silica but if it’s cracked, just call me. I got a new business !!!!

5.       My fish is not eating..

Just give what he or she wants…on a serious note, do not over feed. In fact I am trying to make one more write up on how to feed your fishes because this is the major cause for our killings.

6.       Why are my fishes not dying even after so long???

What a question…I am sad too. My bread and butter is at risk !I am not too sure whether this helped you to fix your problems guys..Leave some comments if there is anything more i can share to make your life easy however come what may, make sure you have an aquarium at home coz i am into this business!