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I was wondering how often everyone feeds their fish.
Fry are exempt as they do need lots of little feeds, but for normal feeding of average fish, how often?

I have been feeding twice a day but I am thinking perhaps this could be too often as fish like guppies just are not bothering to scavenge around and clean their tank. Perhaps the problem is I feed such little mouths too much, not how often I do it?

Bren ...I feed once a day ... 5 days a week normal flake and wafers . Once a week I feed a mixture of Brine Shrimp and Blood worms as well.
I try to make sure that at least 2 days I don't feed at all ...sometimes I used to forget ...so now its no food on the weekend ... its hard... my fish love to beg .

Garry

I only feed once a day and never at water change day. With the extras, fruits, and vegetables there is no set pattern but it is never every day. I also feed them a little lambs liver chopped very fine but I only feed that on the day before the water change.

At the moment as they are in a smaller temp tank until the replacement arrives they are fed sparingly every second day.

Have a look in [link=My Profile] http://www.fishprofiles.com/forums/member.aspx?id=1935[/link] for my tank info

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Keith

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Small amount once per day.
And at least one day per week with no food.

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I find routines are mostly pointless, far better is to start close observation of the fish, perhaps start with seeing how much they eat and seeing how much growth and weight they gain to begin with and then gently cutting back percentages, while at the same time monitoring water quality. Its important to graduate beyond a feeding routine or rule as quickly as possible, feeding a fish should be intuitive and tempered by observation.

Most people running on feeding rules get the feeding wrong, from shops underfeeding and causing fish to be weak, dwarfed, and growth retarded so severely that the fishs true maturation may be held off for anything up to 6 months, and that actually makes correcting that and getting them back to normal size for their age dangerous, all the way through to the unobservant hobbyist who piles food into a fish until it dies.

What you should really do is look at many photographic examples of observe real fish kept under good conditions, and get a sense of what is good shape and form, even colour, and simply feed your fish appropriate to reaching that ideal of plump, yet not obese sleekness and good muscle tone in accordance to species. The sooner you become attuned to that way of looking, youll never use a feeding rule again, and the fish will be much healthier, with normal growth, and probably a good chance at breeding success.

Feeding rules may suit the total beginner, (the usual feed them what they can eat in a minute or two rules) but anyone more than a few weeks into the hobby should be engaging their observational skills and starting to learn about their fishs behaviour and its appearance. Thats one of the real skills behind good fishkeeping, and fish tend not to do too well unless their keeper gets on top of this.

Sooner the better, leave the rules behind, once your eye is in , it becomes easy to know how much to feed a fish by giving them a quick visual check for condition,and remembering the relative effects of the amounts you have given to them before . Then other matters like helping problem feeders and specialist feeders find their optimum feeding method and amount becomes completely natural. It potentially makes spotting internal parasites much easier too.

Judge condition in the fish, then judge the feed. There is no abstract feeding rule that will beat that technique. A lot of feeding rules are beginners crutches, it helps to get off them as soon as possible, and start making your own qualititive judgements based on the reality of a feeding situation. What suits someone elses fish, tank setup, and species diversity may not suit yours and vice versa. Fish from different locales, kept in different temperatures, oxygen levels, and with different ages,and differing available space and flow will all have different metabolic rates and digestive efficiency.It also depends on the nutritive content of the foods you are using. No one rule suits all.

List your food types, fish species and how many you have and their approximate size, the tank dimensions, and average temps, and we can give you a good guess to start from, after that, good observation becomes your tool of refinement in the process.

betta i feed once a day and my comunity tank is two times a day with little feeds unless i give them frozen bloodworms or tubifix or stuff then its once a day

33 gallon 7 neon tetras-5 platys-3 bleeding heart tetras-2 corys-1 rainbow shark-2 L83 gibby plecos

My point exactly.

betta i feed once a day and my comunity tank is two times a day with little feeds unless i give them frozen bloodworms or tubifix or stuff then its once a day

Gives no mention of amount, or the most part of the nutritive quality of the food, and no mention of the species apart from the betta, consequently as an answer its has no meaning in extrapolating something useful for application into one of your own tanks.

Good feeding is about a great deal more than just feeding once or twice a day, indeed, with a number of fish its not how often youre feeding them, but with what and in which amounts that matters, and whether the fish has a small stomach capacity and must be fed often, or a large one with a slow metabolism that could be fed no more than weekly.. perhaps theres even natural food available for browsing, and that too will affect how much supplementary food you give them.

Whether is little and often is best or once in a while is best depends on the species and the conditions they are kept under.

If you want to refine your technique,and im assuming you do, the question to be answered is more complex than just once or twice a day. Asking someone else how they feed their fish does not necessarily reveal useful information about how you should feed yours. If you want a guide on how to feed your own fish, then well need to know what being dealt with. It requires an amount of specific detail.

Twice a day for frys, juveniles and breeding pairs. Once a day for adults in maintenance mode. Skip feeding for one day occasionally.

Either once a day or every other day. My Three-Striped African Glass Catfish are active and appear to need to eat everyday. It's crazy because they're active during the day, but they're even MORE active at night. I wonder when these little guys actually sleep! Most of my other current fish are rather inactive though, and so feedings every other day are more appropriate.

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In my community tank, i feed the surface dwellers (IE: Gouramis) FD Bloodworms (Pre-Soaked Before Feeding), the schooling rasboras FD Tubifex worms or BBS if conditioning, and the bottom dwellers algae pellets and sinking color pellets. All of the FD foods are fed once in every 3 days, and are substituded by floating pellets or color flakes. I would either skip if they look too full, or reduce the amount.

For the betta, i feed very small pieces of a cube of FD tubifex as a bi-weekly treat, color pellets and betta pellets otherwise. Shrimp get leftovers or micro sized algae wafer crumbs.

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once a day for my smaller cichlids in the 89 gal,and 2 small feeds a day for the larger mixed cichlids in the 55 gal

once a day, usually later in the afternoon. and my fish have learned when feeding time is, and are always there waiting to remind me.

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I feed once a day, and miss a day at random. Does the fish good to have a break.

I use flake and granules as staple foods but regularly add in sinking tablets and algae tabs. I also use frozen food (mainly bloodworm, but also daphnia, brine shrmp and mosquito larvae) as a treat a couple of times a week, again with no set pattern.

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long haired git
you quoted what i said i guess then what you said about the food was directed to me as in im doing something wrong
if you would like to know the amount its about nickel sized if you compact the flakes then i gues i forgot my botom feeders every 3 days i give 3 shrimp pellets and 2 algea disc's
im i feeding wrong?

33 gallon 7 neon tetras-5 platys-3 bleeding heart tetras-2 corys-1 rainbow shark-2 L83 gibby plecos

Most of my fish once a day, the Badis when he starts looking thin (two or three weeks, he must find enough to get by between times) I'll get him some ghost shrimp to hunt (or a juvie guppy)

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Not necessarily platy boy, you may well be feeding your fish correctly, however what you do with your fish doesnt necessarily translate into being appropriate for someone elses community.

I think the original poster was wanting to know a way to feed fish more efficiently and correctly,a way to doublecheck what hes doing is correct and like so many questions asked, the problem is in the question itself.

Sometimes the key to providing a good answer is in modifying the question. He assummed finding out what other people do might help him via comparative to get it right, all I was espousing is that its very hard to relate things meaningfully to your own fish when you do that, a better way, rather than use secondary data from someone else,is to learn to assess your own fish more directly and begin the art of learning condition assessment. Its about dropping preconceptions of fish as organisms that require set estimates on feeding , and taking a real genuine look at their health and build , and taking what you see , and translating that into the amount of food you should be giving them.

Ultimately its something everyone has to learn to keep their fish healthy, and its better get directly on to that methodology than to run from an abstract. Visually assessing a fishs health and its relative weight is something that can be learned easily witha little applied close observation, and has immense benefits when you get it right.

I for example can look round the entire stock of a LFS, and feed them (suitable available foods permitting)safetely and adequately by taking a few seconds to visually assess the amount , species and condition of fish in said tank, having never had a previous history of seeing those fish. Its a process of judgement that occurs quite naturally as you progress in the hobby. Granted, I appreciate there are people for whom that ability will remain rather mysterious, but quite a few people I know can do it, myself included, and all without exception learned to do so by leaving the crutch of feeding rules far behind them.

I wasnt singling you out a a bad fish feeder platy boy, the thought never crossed my mind, but it was a fine case example about how a correct answer to the original question actually doesnt help someone calculate how they should feed their own community. The problem was in the question, not in the answers given.

Sometimes helps to look outside the box, as they say.

Great post on feeding everyone... Sure is informative.. I have a general community with guppies, pink zebras and mollies and 2 angels.. All are growing well but I swear they can eat all day long. When your fishes come at the side of the tank when you sit next to it and it seems like they are such beggers for food!

But I stay to just 2x a day feed. When they feed, its such a feeding frenzy as if they never got fed, i hate to think what will happen if i go a full day without feeding them!

AThey all simply devour flakes and whatever blood worms like they never got food!

..



Hobbyists

well, git made me feel better... I feed 4-5 days per week, typically in the evening. I'll vary from flakes to the occasional freeze dried krill maybe once every other week or so. I also supplement the flakes with bloodworms a couple times a week. Once or twice a week, I drop a couple algae tabs in for good measure... But I try not to feed heavily, even though my Tiger Barbs will munch it all down.

i'd have to agree with the git - watching and learning are the best way to judge yr feeding, and should vary tank by tank. check not only the fish themselves but also water quality - cloudy? smelly? probably food related.

optimum fish are muscular, strong bellied and behaving appropriately for their species. feeding time should be no exception. darting in, getting food, or slow stalking predation, etc - it should look like it does in nature! the pecking order of your tank also needs to be taken into account. perhaps feed from two ends (same amount of food, tho) so your alpha fish don't get all the goodies.

i give my carnivores a large range of invertebrates as seasonally available. they get flakes if there's nothing else. because they eat a lot of meat, i feed very little amounts, as needed. herbivores get zucchini and peas, depending on the growth rate of the algae, but especially with sturisoma, watching their bellies when they are on the glass - is the coil of their gut visible, full, what colour is their poo - when it's been brown for a day or two, time for zucchini, which basically goes through them and comes out green.

algae wafers are enjoyed by the tetras for the occasional scavenging exercise - break it up into little blocks and watch them spend an hour or so slowly nibbling it. they get these rarely because you can see the swelling effect on the stomach after they eat this kind of processed food.

food should stimulate your hunters and there should never be excess to vacuum up.

You have some real good advice here and I want to wish you luck. I also want to toss out a warning about the mollies. You mentioned how they look like they are begging. I noticed that mollies are like that and they love to eat. They eat all the time and when they aren't eating they are looking for food. ...nipping at rocks ... algae ... They are pigs. lol I really didn't care for that because I couldn't seem to figure out where their happy place was. The rest of the fish don't seem to be so hungry all the time.

I never did figure it out with the mollies. They are no longer with us. I really hope you figure out the best method for you. Good luck!

Oh and I feed mine a few flakes twice a day (for the tetras and danio) and I put a piece of an algae wafer in every other day for the pleco which the danio also eat a little bit of. I am learning that a variety in diet is more important than frequency in keeping the fish healthy and happy but, like was said before, observation is the key. You'll get to know your fish and their needs as you watch them closely every day.