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What to Feed Your Fish

Fish food, fish food, fish food all fish need to eat food. Before I turn this into like some weird kind of haiku poem let’s go ahead and take a look at some of the stuff that I feed my fish right now and we also have a little package here that Hikari was nice enough to send me with a bunch of like sample sizes of some different stuff. Really appreciate them for doing that. There’ll be links in the description to all the food that I feed my fish. If you want to check them out further let’s just go ahead and start by talking about flake food.

Flake foods

You gotta feed flakes. I think I mean you don’t have to. But it’s just really nice you know this is like the cheapest way to feed your fish and I feed flakes. I don’t know like a few times a week the most important thing when it comes down to food before we talk about all these little things is that you need to have some variability in the fish diet. Okay that’s going to help them out a lot. They appreciate it if you only feed flake food even if it’s you know advanced nutrition has all this stuff in it blah blah blah that’s good for your fish. They’re always going to appreciate getting some different stuff in their diet. So that’s what I like to try and do is mix things up as much as possible.

Feed one thing one day, one thing the next, one thing the next. I mean two three days is the same type of food no big deal. You can obviously keep fish and just feed them flakes all day long. But the more you can mix up their diet and the more that you can feed them good high quality foods, in particular you know stuff like good frozen foods and even live foods, your fish are going to thank you. And they often do that by showing off their best colors. The longer you keep fish and the more you get invested in them you care for them more.

Brine Shrimp and Tubifex

You want to have you know at least me I like to have that feeling of you know I’m doing my fish a favor. They’re liking what I’m giving them and so that’s that’s another reason why I feed different kinds of foods. Now it can get a little expensive when you start to get down into stuff here like the brine shrimp and the tubifex worms and things like that. Those you know some foods don’t last as long as others and they are a little bit more expensive when you compare it to you know a big tub of flakes. So my recommendation always have a giant can of flake food on deck for emergencies. Because you run out of this stuff a lot faster than you run out of this stuff.

Bloodworms

Speaking of running out of stuff I think I am out of yes I am out of jubloodwormsmbo . That’s the other food that I really like to feed my rainbows. They absolutely love the Jumbo frozen bloodworms. They’re are a lot more expensive though when you compare it to the other stuff that we’re looking at today. So what I do is I feed them that really nice protein rich frozen worm. Only about once a week but they they really do appreciate it. So once you spend you know 15 bucks on one of these this lasts for forever. I’ve had this for like I don’t even know like a year so you can see how much value you get out of something like that. Now I don’t feed this every day.

Primarily I feed this other stuff, so let’s talk about it here. Number one we got brine shrimp. This happens to be Hikari and a few of the other things in here are Hikari brand. I sort of cycle between brands just to you know see what I prefer. But the brine shrimp, let’s go ahead and open this up. People can do it one-handed. I’m not strong enough. Oh my god. technical difficulties. The brine shrimp is big. There are these big squares of brine shrimp is that means basically what they are you know they they’re pretty soft. They crumble easily and when you put them in the tank they I mean they immediately, just basically you know dissolve into little chunks and the fish can get a hold of that really good.

Bigger foods

I feed these to my rainbows because they’re a little bit you know bigger pieces of food and I think that they appreciate that let’s go ahead and put that back in there. Actually no that’s let’s feed them. I’ll show you exactly what I’m talking about. Pro tips a day for feeding is to put your food in front of a power head so you can see you know those pieces break up pretty easily. Those are perfect bite sizes for the rainbows and they really appreciate that but you can see one cube goes quick in this tank. But there’s also you know quite a bit of fish in here. So that’s a pretty good choice for you know like rainbows or bigger fish. There’s Roseline sharks in there and there’s also you know Cherry Barbs. They get the leftovers and whatnot.

That’s a good pic for them, look at that piece of blix. Wow, aquascape ruined but if you have smaller fish this might not be the best option. this stuff also goes really quick. I mean there’s I don’t know how many squares are in this container but you know that that doesn’t go very far especially when every time I feed I put in like three of them. So a good option if you have a smaller fish like you have a tetra tank like I do by 72 which is currently a mess again so I’m going to try not to show it that much are the tubifex worms.

Powerhead method

Now I really like these for a couple different reasons. I got to unscrew it the correct way. One the portions are a lot smaller but there’s still a lot of food in here and the individual worms are a lot smaller than the individual brine shrimp so I’m going to pull some out. Just do this. So if you take a look at that if I can get a focus. I need a new camera guys, autofocus. Anyway these are just really small little clumps of worms. Let’s go ahead and take this over to the Tetra tank right now. Pardon the mess but check this out.

So you take it in and these don’t break up as easily. You kind of have to roll them around in your fingers to get them and there’s some you know some powdery stuff coming off of there. No biggie that you got all those little worms and the tetras love these man they absolutely love them. You can also do the powerhead method too but look at that the perfect bite size for the tetras. They love that stuff and I really like it too. It lasts a little bit longer than the other stuff and I always appreciate that.

Hikari bloodworms

So another good food for small fish and I’ve been feeding this in the 90 gallon a lot, are Hikari bloodworms. So the blood worms they have a little slider top. Because you can sprinkle them in just like that and they’re just freeze dried blood worms. So I mean they’re cool. They float. You know the other stuff the other two the what is it the brine shrimp and the tubifex worms they sink pretty good. These blood worms float so they’re kind of like more like flake food in that respect. But let’s go ahead and feed the ninety real quick. Pop this glass piece over and you can just sprinkle it in if you want. Or you can get your fingers in there.

So it’s stuff floating. Yeah the bleeding hearts love the blood worms and that’s a good size food for the inhabitants that I have in this tank. So I’ve been primarily giving them this and I also give them the tubifex worms as well because they’re similar sized but I mix it up. You know some days I do blood worms, some days I do the tubifex worms, some days I even do the brine shrimp because they can they can easily eat that stuff as well for my cichlids that you guys still haven’t seen because the tank is, I’m not going to show it. It’s bad.

Aqueon brand

These are just I think there are Aqueon brand, yeah Aqueon. They’re supposed to be slow sinking pellets but they sink pretty quick which is no big deal. But I mean that’s really all I can say about these. They’re just they’re just cichlid pellets so feed them to your cichlids. And the last thing that I feed, we have some Omega One brand freeze dried shrimp. So they’re not brine shrimp, they’re big shrimp and they’re intended for my Archer fish. Still not strong enough. I had these things because the Archer fish you know likes a bigger food. He’s obviously a bigger fish so he needs to you know and he also needs to feel like he’s hunting kind of, in a way.

I think or at least I like to to give him that sort of experience you know because he doesn’t have the ability to shoot water and and get crickets and stuff in the tank that he’s in right now. So I feed them these but what happens is the rainbows go crazy on them so because these things are super dry and they’re kind of like they’re like sharp on the edges which I don’t like the idea of the fish having to you know bite on something that could potentially harm them. whether or not that’s actually what could happen, who knows. But what I do is I put some here in a little tank water and I let them soak for like two minutes and get them nice and soggy.

What to avoid

What you don’t want to do is do this and then forget that you did it and leave it for like three days. What I’ve done before is I spilled you know a cup like this that wasn’t clear so it was just a cup that I had that was sitting up here and you couldn’t see through it so you couldn’t see the food in it and I left it there for like two or three days. We were coming out into the garage and smelling just like the worst thing ever trying to figure out what it was lo and behold like a week later it was a cup that I had put up here that was full of shrimp and I mean worst smell ever so don’t do that.

Get yourself a clean cup or make sure you don’t forget that it’s filled with shrimp cause it will smell gross but once these have sat for a little while I just go ahead and dump them in using the powerhead and you can see that the Rainbows just go nuts on them and eat most of them and the Archer fish big Teddy Bridgewater kind of a wuss he just pounded one though I wasn’t looking at the camera so I don’t know if he I got that on there but yeah he loves his shrimp. Still pretty finicky, he takes his time. Let’s see him get one, come on Teddy, there’s one. Sometimes he goes up and just slams it. Man, water sprays out of the tank, pretty cool.

Hikari foods

So that’s what I feed right now. Let’s go ahead and check out what Hikari decided to send me because I’m always down to learn about new foods. I think there’s some more stuff in here. We got a bunch of different kinds. Alright, so first up we have some discus, it’s bio gold so these are what are these are sinking protein packed pellets. Very cool, don’t have discus yet but I might be getting some. We also have some sinking wafers. Those are going to be good for the shrimp tank.

I’ve been putting in these wafers that are way too big. So those will be nice to have but these are something that’s you know good for Cory cats, good for you know plecos as well. As you know you’ve got some pictures on here loaches are going to love those. We got a little pack here of was that shrimp cuisine. Very nice. I have shrimp. I hope they like cuisine. These are just a really small you know sinking pellet or a little ball what-have-you but looks pretty cool. Wish they would have sent me some more of that.

Micro pellets

We also have some micro pellets. So what I like to do is look at the pictures and that kind of tells you what type of fish they’re going to be good for. These are probably like a slow sinking pellet that I actually I haven’t used this stuff before. If they’re just small so they’re going to be good for the Tetra tank as well as the 9t looking good and last we have some micro wafers. So these are going to be another slow sinking spirulina based food. These are going to be good for all types of fish. So very cool. Thank you once again Hikari for sending me those foods. You can find them in the description if you happen to be interested.

So I think that’s going to pretty much wrap it up for today’s video guys. I hope you enjoyed it. I know I was a little rambling and kind of all over the place today but I wanted to get this video done and share with you the stuff that I feed. You know if you’re a beginner you might be a little overwhelmed with all the choices out there. Maybe it helped you sort some things out in your mind. Gave you a good idea of what maybe you should be feeding your fish and of course no matter what you do just try and get a few different types and mix it up from time to time. Your fish will appreciate it. They’re going to show it in their colors. Spend the money on the food. You got to do it. It’ll be worth it.

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