Feeding Your Aquarium Fish For Optimum Health

Wondering why your fish are looking listless, not eating well or unhealthy? If you have been doing a good job of maintaining water quality, these worrying symptoms could well boil down to poor dietary habits.

Feeding fish isn’t just a matter of dumping a few pinches of flakes into the tank. Freshwater and saltwater fish, and the different species belong to these two groups, have their particular dietary requirements.

Though you can’t possibly emulate the same conditions as the fishes’ natural environment, understanding the fundamentals of fishkeeping and the fishes’ feeding requirements will help keep them healthy over the long term.

How Much to Feed

• In a newly setup aquarium, feeding must be strictly regulated. Make a conscious effort to underfeed for the first week or so to minimize the level of nitrites (the harmful by-product of fish waste) in the aquarium, which can harm fishes’ health.
• Do not think that a bigger fish needs more food – the mass of a fish’ body has little bearing on the capacity of its digestive system.
• Offer your fish as much food as they will readily consume within a few minutes. Any food remaining after three or four minutes should be regarded as excess.
• Never overfeed. Well-fed fish can accumulate a generous amount of reserves and go without food for long periods by surviving on these reserves.

How Often to Feed

• Fish hobbyists should establish a routine that suits their fishes’ feeding habits and their own schedules. For instance, you feed them in the morning before going out to work, and in the evening on returning home.
• Fish can only digest a limited amount of food at any one time, so don not dispense extra food to cover prolonged periods of absence. The excess will just go to waste and pollute the water.
• Young fish require high levels of nutrition, so frequent feeds of about five times a day, and daily water changes of about 20 per cent, will help spur their growth.

What to Feed

• Saltwater or marine fish are a varied bunch and have more complex feeding requirements. Some filter-feed, some draw in water and siphon out the microscopic organism from it, and some scavenge for prey. Others prefer to hunt down their meal or eat only greens, and then there are those that simply do not care what drops in – they’ll just eat it. Some marine fish are slow to take food in captivity. Feeding of live food will help improve their appetite.
• Whether you keep freshwater or marine fish, give a variety of food to make their diet more interesting.
• If you wish to condition your fish for breeding, give them a varied diet that includes live and frozen foods. Bear in mind that in such cases, it’s also important to establish a feeding routine.

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