What do you feed your fish?

Capt_Cully

New member
For almost 9 years I have fed frozen mysis. As I downsize and simplify, I'd love to switch over to pellets. Never had much success getting fish to eat, thrive, or survive on the stuff. I feel I've got a firm grasp on corals, fish.... Not my strong suit.

Please list your feeding regimen here.
Food
Schedule
Special twists

Greatly appreciated!

Cully
 
NLS pellets, pretty much exclusively.

I've got an auto-feeder that hits them twice a day. About three days a week, I'll dump some of the larger NLS pellets in.

Once every few months, I'll throw a cube of frozen or some nori in there.

Honestly, I initially thought the NLS claim to feed their product exclusively was a pile of horse crap. My experience over the past few years shows that I was dead wrong.

Fish are fat, colorful, active and spawning regularly.

Battles with nuisance algae are fewer and farther between as well.
 
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I mix a little of each of these in an autofeeder set to go off three times daily and I also make a "rods like" blend diy style and break off a little each evening and thaw it in a bowl and use a baster to squirt in a little at a time over a few hours in the evening. I dont feed the frozen every single day but try to.
 
every morning 1 sheet of nori.the tangs and the emporer love it. followed with nls pellets for small fish and for large fish. once in a blue moon they get frozen food. and that's the only thing I put in my tank besides more fish coral and my hands.
 
Im happy with just NLS I'm using the +A; it smells like they add garlic. I'm around home so I give them 4-6 pinches a day; I have an auto feeder that drops four times per day when I'm away. When conditioning new fish to pellets, I do something similar to Ponytail Dave using live brine, frozen mysids, and slowly mixing in pellets. A short soaking keeps the NLS a wee bit more neutrally buoyant. You can believe the hype with the NLS.
 
NLS 1mm pellets 2X a day by auto-feeder, a cube of homemade frozen food mix at night, and 1/8th a sheet of nori 3x a week. Auto feeder has been a God-send as I often leave before my fish are up, and come home after lights out (completely erratic, grad and med school aren't really the best for having a set schedule).

Fish are colorful and happy :). The auto-feeder also made my fish less lazy as they couldn't just wait for me to stand in front of the tank to start looking for food :)
 
Is it difficult to make the switch to pellets? I'd live to get an auto feeder going, currently only have a hippo, yellow tang, clown, cleaner shrimp and urchin in my tank. Been feeding them brine everyday, mysis every now and then.
 
For the 5 nanos at home with fish in them (2g cube is fishless) I feed a rotation of the 1mm NLS pellets, 1mm Formula 1 pellets, Hikari Marine S (smaller than 1mm), Hikari Seaweed Extreme small pellets (larger than 1mm, and most of my fish freaking love them!), Tetra MicroCrab granules, Omega One green seaweed sheets (only for 40B/ yellow tang and 29g/ cherub angel pair), and Hikari frozen Mysis and frozen enriched brine shrimp. I also occasionally feed freeze-dried/ reconstituted Cyclopeeze to the various nanos, but especially to the 15g column that houses a pair of firefish - I have never found them willing to take prepared foods...:(

Every tank is fed once a day minimum, with no set schedule of specific food to be fed or at what time, and the pelleted foods are pre-soaked so that they don't go through the overflows and into the sump. I also have a 9g nano in the office with two small fish that is fed pellets exclusively, 3 to 4 days a week simply because it is easier and work is often hectic...:)
 
After years of feeding mysis I just switched to NLS pellets based on the suggestions from Conesus_Kid and others. Hoping it makes a difference with my cyano issue.
 
It's hard to believe fish can be manipulative, but mine definitely worked me in the past. My schedule is quite irratic as well. I will be attempting to get them into NLS & Formula 1. My tangs really never showed much interest in Nori or other offered greens. Weird I know. But it always wound up in a powerheads or in a million pieces in the teeth of the overflow. I did give them a mix I called "fish cocaine", a mix of cyclopeeze and Nutramar ova twice a week. Their reaction was something similar to kids on Halloween night after too much candy.

Generally I'm complacent with "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". But, I'm trying to streamline and remove the things about reef keeping that are tedious. Thawing and rinsing frozen chunks of mysis every night, of for several nights if working or going away had become something I detested.

I'll give these other methods and preparations a try in the new tank. Hopefully I'm not sitting with my nose against the tank banging on the glass like I'm watching a hockey fight as the pellets sink to the bottom and bloat AFTER my fish taste and regurgitate them.
 
At first, there is a bit of the frustration of watching them sink straight away to the bottom; it takes a little work getting them on pellets, but it worth it. I love when I have a moment to thaw some food, forget about it, and find it rotten chum hours later.
 
Rinsing frozen foods?

Oh hell no!

I feed NLS pellet and Pro Salt frozen sparingly and once a day.
Sometimes I'll toss em shrimp, broccoli, frozen orange section, Iams dog food. Woof.
 
Wow, didn't know about that. Sorry to hear Gary. You didn't have to cut a hole in the side of the house to get him out did you? You should take him to a taxidermist.
 
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