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In a previous thread of mine Calilasseia was very helpful in describing a feeding regimen to help improve fish acclimation while in quarantine. He discussed feeding various live foods in addition to a variety of flakes.

Being a beginner I have found live food sort of intimidating so I tried some frozen blood worms with my tetras that I recently purchased. Unfortunately, they completely ignored them. So I was wondering if I could gather some of the collective experience here to answer some questions about live food.

1. Does anyone use the frozen food over the live? Do the fish go for it like the live version?
2. What type of live food is best for small fish like tetras?
3. How do you get your live food stock?
4. Do you raise it or buy it?
5. How expensive is it to do versus frozen?
6. If you raise it what do you need to do?

Sorry for the ton of questions (and I'm sure I'll think of more) but I was hoping we could get a good discussion going for us newbs

If there are any good articles out there please feel free to link them. I have found lots of stuff telling the virtues of live food, just not a lot on how to do it.

Thanks
Rick


Rick
See all my pictures at Google Web Albums

I use frozen food over live foods due to the risk of pathogens being present in the live foods.

So i will try and answer some of your questions for you:


1) i have tried live foods and the fish did love it but they seem to enjoy the frozen stuff just as much and the frozen is gamma treated and guaranteed to be pathogen free. how did you introduce the frozen food to the tank? i always have a little pot or glass next to the tank and scoop up some tank water and put the frozen food in there to defrost for 5 minutes before feeding it to them. i keep cardinal tetras and glowlights and they absolutely love the stuff!!

2) I have tried many different types of frozen foods with my fish but not many live foods but i can tell you what i know about the frozen ones. By far the favorite of my tetras is bloodworms, they also like brine shrimp, artemia, tubifex and daphnia

3) If i was to buy live foods i buy them from my LFS they get deliveries of live foods twice a week but it sells out incredibly fast

4) i do not raise any, just buy it over the counter of my LFS

5) £ for £ i think, around here anyway, frozen food works out cheaper than live. there are always deals running on frozen stuff, such as buy any 5 get 2 free , etc

6) sorry don't raise it, can't help you there

By the way i am by no means, an expert but have been keeping fish for two years now and have had lots of success so far, hope this is of some help

First of all, I'm fortunate in that I know the provenance of my live food (i.e., the supplier and the source) and therefore have the luxury of being able to feed my fishes live foods on a regular basis without pathogens being a major worry.

Second, although raising Daphnia in captivity is something of a black art, because if you raise them in anything other than a large pond, they're e to population crashes, it's still eminently possible. If you can create 'green water' (i.e., a eutrophic bloom of unicellular algae), then you're 90% of the way toward keeping Daphnia alive in a tank, because the unicellular algae that make up 'green water' blooms is the principal foodstuff of these creatures. If you are worried about introducing pathogens into your aquarium, then starting your own Daphnia culture isn't that hard - just make sure you have cultures in rotation so that if one crashes for some reason, you've still got them available to feed your fishes and restart the crashed culture.

Third, even if you still worry about the possibility of something getting into your food chain despite running Daphnia cultures (which if they're run properly should not be a problem, but still) you can always raise Brine Shrimp. A nice pathogen free food for your fishes. Brine Shrimp hatchery kits are available by the truckload in decent retailers, along with the eggs, the salt mixes and the instructions. If you want your Brine Shrimp to grow into bigger ones to feed adult fishes, a good food for the Brine Shrimp is baker's yeast - mix some up in fresh water and a little sugar, keep it warm for 24 hours, then add salt and throw it in with the Brine Shrimp. They should also be partial to green water once you've added salt to it (or you could cultivate double-marine-strength green water specially for them)

So, if you want to cultivate live food, there's plenty of instructions around on how to do it (any decent microscopy site, for example, will have lots of instructions on cultivating infusoria, Daphnia, Cyclops and a host of creatures you've never even heard of) and as for obtaining starter cultures, if you're really worried about introducing unwanted nasties into your aquarium, you could always send off for laboratory cultures (produced under sterile conditions), although these will be a LOT more expensive than simply using Daphnia or other like organisms from a pond. Even so, you can still quarantine your Daphnia, just like you do with fish ...

When I feed bought live food (sold in bags at my LFS), I strain the live food through a net and give it a thorough washing. I do NOT add the water from the bags, because that is asking for trouble! In any case, you HAVE to strain the Brine Shrimp because you don't want to add high-strength brine, even in small quantities, to a fresh-water aquarium, do you?

I've been using live food regularly every week now for 11 years. In that time I think I've had a total of four disease incidents, and each time, feeding live food while medicating the fishes hastened their recovery. It's not just the nutrients in live food that seem to work wonders, but the whole business of the fishes pursuing their food, pouncing on it and then devouring it - it seems to provide double the satisfaction, and happy fishes, first of all, get sick less often, and second, recover faster when they do fall prey to something like fin rot.

Oh if you want to dose live food with medication to make absolutely sure that there are no 'fellow travellers' you don't want, then this too is entirely possible. Just don't use a copper based med for the purpose or you'll kill off some live food organisms before they're ready to be fed to the fishes! However, although I haven't had the need to experiment with this, it's possible that you could use live foods as a means of getting finicky fishes to take oral medication, provided that the live food organisms will absorb the meds, though I'd have to conduct experiments before being sure that this worked.

As for live food bringing pathogens into the aquarium, if your aquarium is well maintained, with good water quality and healthy, well fed fishes, your fishes should have sufficiently healthy immune systems to deal with occasional introductions. The only cases where I would consider vigilance appropriate are: [1] Argulus fish lice (these are actually crustaceans), but since these are large enough and distinctive enough to be spotted by a simple visual examination and weeded out, these are a minor hazard, and [2] Camallanus nematodes, which use Cyclops as a secondary host, and which require farily powerful medication to deal with if they do affect your fishes. However, Camallanus is now eminently treatable, and if your live food source is a fish-free pond, digenetic nematodes such as Camallanus won't get a look-in anyway.

Oh, it's possible to write a whole book on this subject. In fact, I think if you check the TFH book catalogue, there may already be several if you're really interested in picking them up and reading them!


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Welcome to FP Rick !

"Being a beginner I have found live food sort of intimidating"

I've kept fish for over 20 years, and I'm equally intimidated now that I'll have to culture some microworms and baby brine shrimp for breeding cichlids and their fry, so don't feel bad, you are not the only one ! It's a new area for me too.

Like you did, almost immediately I looked for alternate solutions to culturing. Wanted to save some work and time. But mostly, it's a fear of failing or screwing up.

Give it a try at least, and so will I

The Amazon Nut...

I gave up using live food years ago I just could not trust the conditions where they came from.

I buy the frozed Blood worms (three times a week) bulk and never a problem.
I think once they know its food they will eat it.

I have collected live bait for fishing and I certainly would never use any of that in my tanks.

Have a look in [link=My Profile]http://
www.fishprofiles.com/interactive/forums/profile.asp?userid=6741" style="COLOR: #00FF00[/link] for my tank info

[link=Betta 11Gal Desktop & Placidity 5ft Community Tank Photos]http://photobucket.com/albums/b209/keithgh/Betta%20desktop%20tank/" style="COLOR: #00FF00[/link]

Keith

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Thanks for the warm welcome! I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who has
grappled with this topic before.

It seems like that live food is an excellent choice if the proper effort is put in to insure a disease free culture. However, the frozen foods are simpler to work with, and I am begging to think it may be better for novices like me.

Are the frozen bloodworms a good choice for most community fish (i.e., Neon Tetra's, Corys, Rasboras, etc.) or should that be varied like the flakes?

When you feed the fish frozen bloodworms food do you add the normal flake with it or only feed the worms?

Once a week is what my LFS has told me for frequency of using things like bloodworms. Is that enough or would you recommend using it more frequently?

Thanks for being patient with me as I soak this stuff in!
Rick


Rick
See all my pictures at Google Web Albums

No worries rick, Its great that you are asking all these questions

You are probably right, there would be little benefit to you culturing live food for community fish at the moment while you are still getting a grasp on the other ins and outs of fishkeeping, and besides, in most cases frozen is just as good nutritionally, in some cases its better as the bugs are soaked in/fed things like vitamin C and vegetable matter.

You can feed frozen every day in some cases, but in your case, with a newish (under 6 months old i'm guessing?) tank and small community fish, you are probably best off limiting it to 2-3 times a week. Maybe if you feed it on alternate days? or every 3 days?

The way I feed frozen food to my fish is a bit fussy, but it might be useful to you. My fish won't eat an entire cube in a sitting, so I slice a frozen cube in half with a knife (X-acto or something sharp) and pop half back in the freezer and toss the other half in a cup. I then get a turkey baster and add a squirt of tank water to the cup to defrost the food. I have some very shy fish, and some very greedy ones, so feeding this way allows me to spread the food over a wider area and give the more retiring fish a chance to eat before the piggies get it all I use the turkey baster to 'whoosh' the food into 2 different corners of the tank

There isn't anything wrong with tossing in half a cube though, providing the fish will eat it and not let it spoil. Just be careful the first few times you feed it as they do tend to gorge a bit and having a gut full of protien ain't always a good thing

Maybe start with something high fibre like daphnia or maybe brine shrimp? Hikari has both of those in frozen cubes Bloodworms are also great, but don't overfeed and be careful that you aren't allergic to them (I am, so I feel a warning is only fair, great food if you can handle it though )



For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. - Terry Pratchett

I feed live as a treat for now (guppies,tetras,platys,betta) but this summer I may get to build my monster tank, so I'll have to then.

Currently, I feed mosquito larva, brine shrimp, or guppy fry as treats, depending on time of year, etc. The guppy fry I get from my daughter's tank, the mosquito larva I get from a 5 gal bucket on the back porch for most of the year, and the brine shrimp come from a very good LFS.

If you have bigger fish, you may want to look into culturing small earthworms, or check the bait shops for wax worms, meal worms, small red wigglers, etc.