[tomfromstlouis]

Do you think there is any significant nutritional difference between live food and frozen or freeze dried? Let's also set aside the potential for parasites or other nasties in live foods (certainly a risk with "wild caught" live foods, maybe less so with worms you raise yourself).

I ask because I realized that I am pretty much dependent on freeze dried with occasional flake. Everyone seems happy and healthy with this but when you read about conditioning fish for breeding, or really any top notch keeper's advice, all you hear about is live food. This is not nearly as convenient as my current regime. Any reason I should complicate this any further?

 

[Sake]

Well there is the extra challenge of raising live foods to make things a bit more fun. I think the real reason people culture/feed live food is that you know exactly what is going into your tank.

What you feed your live food, you feed your fish. Just like back in the day when I raised crickets/mice for my reptiles, I'd gut load the crickets with the proper food, and feed the mice healthy foods to insure that my reptiles got everything they needed.

On top of that, I know live food can trigger a breeding reaction in a lot of fish. My cheapo neon tetras started doing the naughty after I tossed in a few mosquito larva in the tank lol.

 

[BBradbury]

Fish Foods

Do you think there is any significant nutritional difference between live food and frozen or freeze dried? Let's also set aside the potential for parasites or other nasties in live foods (certainly a risk with "wild caught" live foods, maybe less so with worms you raise yourself).

I ask because I realized that I am pretty much dependent on freeze dried with occasional flake. Everyone seems happy and healthy with this but when you read about conditioning fish for breeding, or really any top notch keeper's advice, all you hear about is live food. This is not nearly as convenient as my current regime. Any reason I should complicate this any further?

Hello tom...

Feeding your fish good food isn't difficult. Look at the list of ingredients. If the list is extremely short and you can pronounce the name and it's familiar to you, then you can be confident it's good for your fish. If the list is "continued on the next container", then I'd definitely question the nutritional value.

I feed mostly a variety of frozen foods. The ingredients are simple: the frozen animal and water.

B

 

[sayurasem]

I used to feed my fish live food as often as I can. This goes from small beta fish to arowana. Maybe I'm just evil and like to see things eaten alive o.o

 

[fusiongt]

I've never looked into getting live foods and my fish seem happy and doing well with a mixture of flake and frozen (blood worms, brine shrimp, daphnia, some more) foods. My LFS I've seen mostly feed frozen blood worms on every tank.

 

[AVN]

I've conditioned many kinds of fish to breed without ANY live foods. It's not necessary.

Flake and frozen Bloodworms work fine, even with fickle fish. The only time I've used live foods are to feed fry.

 

[R.sok]

I used to feed live fish to my cichlids. Not store bought feeders though, you never know the condition of them. If you go live feeders, breed your own! I don't really like freeze dried worms either, frozen blood worms on the other hand I use. Pellets I recommend Nls or omega one

 

[auban]

i dont see a reason why you would have to go with live food other than to feed fish that wont eat anything unless it moves.

i breed some wild caught fish that wont eat flake or frozen. if it doesnt move, they dont notice it. other than that, you dont need it.

having said that, if you want to add a supplement to your fishes diet, like caratinoids, an easy way to do it is to gut load some live foods and then feed them off.