One of the most important foods you can provide your saltwater aquarium is frozen foods, and the fresher the better.  Believe it or not, I am shocked at how often I come across a fellow hobbyist whose saltwater fish are only fed dry flakes and pellet food. Yes there have been big advances in these diets, but again, diversity is king.  So make sure frozen foods are a part of your saltwater fish’s diet.

 

 

 

 

FROZEN

As for frozen foods, there are many different kinds. We typically use fresh frozen foods as a preference over gels.  Although I have experienced great results with gel foods too, we just prefer the fresh-frozen.  A nice thing about the gels is that they are very convenient and most of them are made up of many different kinds of fresh frozen foods. 

One important thing to note about all frozen foods is that they need to be rinsed before feeding them into your aquarium.  The reason for this is, that when you thaw out even our top favorite brand of frozen food, there is yucky off-colored syrup left behind that will pollute your water quality.  So, what we recommend is to thaw out your frozen food, and then pour it through find net, such as a brine shrimp net, and then rinse it under tap water, and voila it’s ready to feed.

The frozen foods we like to use are mysis shrimp and enriched adult brine shrimp.  And then especially for new arrivals, we also feed “cyclopeeze” to help kickstart their appetite (only for the first week).

 

 

 

 

MYSIS

As for the mysis, our favorite brand is Piscine Energetics.  Their mysis are large and you get more mysis than water in the packets (some other brands have a lot of water once thawed = lower value).  And they are extremely fresh and you get whole mysis, not bits and chunks.  Also, this is the major brand that is preferred by most of the curators at public aquariums.  You can visit their site at http://www.mysis.com.

 

 

 

 

ENRICHED ADULT BRINE SHRIMP

Adult brine shrimp is one of the most widely fed frozen foods for saltwater aquariums. It’s cheap and fish gobble it up.  And yet, by itself, it is not very nutritious.  But when you gut-load them with HUFAs (i.e. omega 3 fatty acids, etc.) or spirulina algae, they are fantastic.  The brand we currently use is San Francisco Bay Brand (http://www.sfbb.com/frozen.asp#).  I’m not sure if this is still the case, but when I originally was seeking a manufacturer who enriched their adult brine shrimp, San Francisco Bay Brand was the only one we could find, and they now have two types of enriched brine:  Omega 3 and the spirulina enriched. Both are fantastic.

 

 

 

 

GEL FOODS

While we have not focused on using gel foods as part of our feeding regimen, we have clients who do and the results they get with their fish are just as good.  One of the pros to using gel foods is that they typically come in cube form in foil packets. This makes feeding and portioning easy.  On the con side to using gel foods, it is more difficult to rinse them if they are made with a gel binder, and thus all that soup goes into your tank adding to pollution and can degrade water quality.  But overall, they are a great way to go.  Two of the brands we have experience with are Ocean Nutrition and San Francisco Bay Brand.  Of course there are many others.

 

 

 

 

Our next post will cover pellet foods and how to feed which foods in which order. Believe it or not, the sequence in which you feed these different food types does matter. 

Happy Fishes,

Warren Gibbons,

Gibbons Aquaria, Inc.

P.S. If you are enjoying what you are reading here and would like more  in-depth information on how to finally make your saltwater aquarium actually work, go to www.saltwateraquariumsecrets.com and sign up for our free newsletter.


Technorati Tags: Diet

Tagged with:

Filed under: Uncategorized

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!