Feeding Fish

Beside the water quality, the next important things is providing the required nutrition to the fish. A well-fed with the required nutrition fish is able to heal itself from an injury, fend off bacterial infections, and resist other diseases through immunity and protein-charged barriers (e.g., a healthy mucous coating). This is what I am going to discuss.

Finding the right kinds of foods that suitable to the kind of fish being cared for is sometimes not so easy and maintain the correct diets that have the required nutrients for the fish required time and discipline. 

Before buying any fish, you need to understand the eating behaviour, whether it is carnivore (meat eating fish), herbivore (vegetable eating fish) and omnivore (both meat and vegetable eating fish). With this categorization is the basics for deciding what foods are appropriate for any particular fish.

The eating behaviour will determine the feeding frequency and the time that you feed the fish, for example, it is best to feed hermit crab at night when the light is off and all the fishes are asleep. Other example, the most of the fishes, such as Angel fish are small meal eaters because its digestive track can take small intake of foods as they are wildly caught. It will create some inconveniences for people with full time jobs, so try to feed them three meals per day.

I normally feed the fish in morning and night myself and have a timer that feed the fish once a day at around 1pm. This will control the amount of foods and observe the fish during feeding to check on the health of the fish. By reducing the amount of food in the mid day over time; after some time, your fishes will custom to your style of feeding, then you can feed them twice a day. Below is the timer I used.

Next time, I will discuss about the type of additives/nutrients required and my feeding methods and foods.