Fish Food 101

travis32

New member
I've had reefs for a few years and am starting over with a much larger reef now, a 340 Gallon display. So far cycles are done, algae cycle is starting, and just have 7 fish in the display so far and no corals.

Adding fish slowly and in a month or so I'll start adding corals in.

What is the best food to feed. I have a very young Dragon Wrasse that is awesome to watch. a couple oscillerus clowns and some pajama cardinals, and a royal gramma. I plan to add a black tang, possibly some bellas angels, and a combination of herbivores and carnivores.

I used to feed flake food religiously and always had luck with lazy eaters that didn't swim after pellet food, they'd go after flake food that floated by.

some people say flake food is horrible, but if there's finicky eaters, I find it's much easier to get fish to eat flake than pellet food. I once had a marine beta that wouldn't touch pellets with a ten foot pole, but stick flake food in with my fingers and he came up to me eating from my fingers.

He loved it. I mix in some selcon soaked frozen mysis / brine now and then to boost their health.

Is flake truly terrible for reef fish?

That is the question? Obviously frozen is probably going to retain more nutrients. We can do some amazing thing with flake food though?

Just curious....
 
Well, I know some will disagree, but personally having kept reefs of over 20 years (my clown fish is 21 years old), for years my fish got almost nothing but flakes. In addition to the clown, I had a flame hawk that lived 19 years before I lost him to jumping. I currently feed mainly pellets because they work best in my auto feeder, and supplement with frozen a couple times a week for variety. And algae in a clip a couple times a week too

Live and frozen are very important for getting anew fish eating in QT, but I want all of my fish to readily accept dry food because a travel fairly often and when I do, I need to know they will eat what is in the auto feeder.

None of the above applies to my mandarin. She only eats pods or baby brine shrimp, but my tank is self sustaining for pods.
 
I use what my LFS recommended as my basic food - Dainichi pellets. I am very happy with them and the background information I've been provided is very positive with regard to the quality of their ingredients.

I know some of this will be their spin on it, but the LFS owner (Paul Talbot) toured their premises and was impressed with the fact they order their ingredients on demand to meet output needs instead of stockpiling it. This means the real age of the pack you buy is much better than other brands.

Makes sense to me and so far my results are good. I also supplement with frozen Mysis from Ocean Nutrition, again so far so good. The reason for this choice is just that this is the brand my other trusted LFS stocks, again I am happy to take their recommendation as they are a quality outlet. I am Australian based so the brand names may be different elsewhere.


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Flakes and pellets are basically the same thing, so it seems silly to say pellets are better. Either is fine.

Everything will benefit from some frozen meaty (Mysis, etc) a few times a week.

Tangs, rabbits, dwarf and full-size angels will benefit from nori.

Full-size angels should probably get some frozen with sponge in it.

In general, flakes and pellets are good, and they make life easy. But you should feed a variety, and you should offer fishes what they are adapted to and meant to eat.
 
I feed flake frozen pellets nori shrimp squid etc. My fish eat betterthan I do. I just prefer a mixture.
On another note those dragon wrasses are fun to watch but might not be so much fun later. They are called rockmovers for a reason. I had one for a while but it rearranged everything and with a sand bed it was a non stop cloud. He ended up at the LFS.
 
Feed variety. I don’t personally do flake food because I find it messy, plus my fish will essentially eat anything I offer ..... unusually very quickly.
 
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