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Will oscars eat feeder guppies as well as normal flakes and pellets?

Chris

Yes but it's not the healthiest for them. Feeder guppies often carry illnesses or parasites and I believe they are quite a fattening food for a fish. Better fed as a treat or compliment to a diet instead of frequently and better that you raise your own than buy the ones from the store which have been exposed to all sorts of illnesses.

do you have the tank for one?

but yes, they will eat live foods, but really alot of market "feeder" fish are sick and can cause health problems for anything that eats them, packaged foods are better.

I was planning on breeding feeder guppies to dilute illness, then feed them to the Oscars... Would that work?

Chris

If you segregate the fry from the parents as early as possible it probably would work.As long as you quarantine the parental generation of your feeder guppies, and keep them in spotless condition , it should work out fine. You can feed an oscar entirely satisfactorily without live food, so unless you wanted to keep guppies anyway, theres little point.

I think that I would avoid the guppies altogether. If you wish to give your fish a special treat, try earthworms or nightcrawlers. You can cut the larger ones up into smaller pieces or feed the smaller ones whole.

Jim

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Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody. -- Mark Twain

Guppies are ok, but should not be the staple food(nor should goldfish). Use an apropriate sized cichlid pellet for the main feedings. You do risk disease introduction, and also fatty liver with a diet too high in fish.

OKay, So basically stick with pellets but every once and a while i can give them feeders that have been hand bred and separated from parents?

Chris

I would think that it would be easier and cheaper to just Quarantine them instead of breeding your own and yes, don't feed them as a staple diet, merely a treat.

Well i am going to get a new tank, I was planning on a 60 gallon when i am older. I hear livefoods are better for the fish, and yes partly entertainment, no I am not a sadist...

Chris

It depends on what type of fish your feeding, what live food your using, and what else your feeding as to whether it's good for them or not. Usually, unless you have a species that will only take live food, it is used on fish you want to condition for breeding and even then I don't think most use other fish for that. They use things like insects, nightcrawlers, shrimp, and other small aquatic critters. Most of the time sticking to dried and frozen with occasional live treats is better. It's not a good idea to feed high fat, high calorie, or high protein foods to an animal, including a fish, that is not using them. I feed mostly frozen food to mine with a couple days a week being dried food and the occasional crickets or similar. Congo tetras love tearing crickets apart. You almost have to feel sorry for the poor crickets.

i am sorry chris if i am sounding like a .....

but i had a fish related issue, so sorry if i sound alittle off.

but anyway, i wish you luck with it. and my advice is to go with pellets at first to grow him, so when he is larger you can feed him large items that often are more hardy.

Don't worry about it, But yeah, I was planning on feeding it pellets as a staple diet but feeder guppies as a treat (whenever they grow to a certain size). Is it true that Live foods are good for increasing excersise? Also live foods dont rot if I were to go away. They will last...

Chris

What food is going to rot? Not frozen food because it should be frozen in your freezer until right before you go to feed it and any that you thaw and don't use that day should be thrown away. Frozen food will keep fresh for months. Possibly even longer than some dried foods. More likely to lose your live food to water quality problems or tank equipment problems than your frozen food unless your freezer quits on you.

Like so i can go away on vacation and I can't put it all in at once, unlike feeders...

Chris

Hi,
When I had oscars, I fed them pellets, chopped beef heart,
fry from my guppies and swordtails, earth worms, and
bugs from the neighborhood (grasshoppers, crickets, etc.)
Those oscars would go NUTZ when we approached the tank
with a jar of bugs!
Eventually, they grew large enough to pan fry and feed a
family! (NO, we did not) I wound up giving them to
someone who had a 240G tank. It was lots larger than my
55.

Frank

-->>> The Confidence of Amateurs, is the Envy of Professionals <<<--

You may find that feeding live insects to your Oscar is less troublesome than culturing guppies as food. Provided you can find a source of insects that haven't been sprayed with pesticides of course!

As Frank says above, big Cichlids like crunching live insects. I suspect they do this a fair amount in the wild, so if you used live insects, you'd be recreating a part of the Oscar's wild diet in any case.

Earthworms have LONG been renowned as a favourite treat for big Cichlids. In fact, you will have to watch that your Oscar doesn't try conditioning you into pandering to its tastes once you start introducing it to earthworms - some Cichlids have been known to go on hunger strike unless fed earthworms round the clock because they love them so much, and because they know their keepers will give in! Don't let the Oscar run your life like that, show him who's boss!

The venerable Innes book mentions insects as Cichlid fodder. And also cites that certain aquatic insects are VERY useful in helping to maintain pair bonds and parental instincts. Basically, you drop in a couple of live insects with a breeding pair of big Cichlids, and they go into "search and destroy" mode. This gives them double satisfaction - one, they get a meal, and two, they destroy potential threats to their fry, and get that warm fuzzy feeling of being a good parent. Oscars respond particularly well to this.

If your Oscar is 4 inches or more, then it'll be able to handle destroying Water Boatmen and small aquatic beetles with ease. An 8 inch Oscar will be capable of dispatching big diving beetles and dragonfly larvae. An Oscar that size will also be more than capable of acting as a pest controller if you have a cockroach problem - bait a jar with some food, set it up so that the cockroaches can't escape once they fall in, and then let your Oscar have a fine time munching on six legged Doritos.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

mine love a lot of guppies to chase all over the the tank i breed my own in a 20 gallon tank. or i feed my convict cichlids babies