Feed live food?

LoneStarReef

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I have been reading some posts here lately about immunity and how the quality of the food we feed our fish helps them fight disease and pests. This has gotten me thinking about possibly feeding fish nothing but a combination of different live foods. Does anybody do this? How practical would this be?

Thanks in adavce for your responses.
 
A varied diet is really all you need IME. If you want to feed things like live black worms or live brine shrimp that's fine, but the same results can be achieved with any of the prepared foods on the market as well.
 
I started feeding live black worms and can visibly see a difference in my fish appearance. I am a convert now... and think feeding a mix is required. LIVE FOOD + high quality flake & pellets with supplements and algae. I am now investigating how to harvest pods. better food = better health. I am still going to QT my new fish but definitely think we must also provide better nutrition to help our fish fight disease.

Neptune
 
I started feeding live black worms and can visibly see a difference in my fish appearance. I am a convert now... and think feeding a mix is required. LIVE FOOD + high quality flake & pellets with supplements and algae. I am now investigating how to harvest pods. better food = better health. I am still going to QT my new fish but definitely think we must also provide better nutrition to help our fish fight disease.

Neptune

Nice. Thanks Neptune. That's exactly what I wanted to know. Do you find the black worms at your local LFS? I will see if I can find them here in my area. It looks like the only place in the country that distributes them is in central CA.
 
@LoneStarReef I was able to locate live black worms from a freshwater fish provider 5 mins from my house. Lucky! I *think* it is more common for freshwater fish keepers / breeders to use live black worms. You do need to keep them cold in a fridge and change water every few days. After feeding live black worms for 1 week / 10 days my blue hippo tang who had just started to have HLLE on his face CLEARED UP completely. My mandarin also eats the worms! So to me the investment in better food is worth it. I keep mine refrigerated in an outdoor fridge in a drawer. I mark it fish food and do not open. I fear friends will see black worms in the fridge and freak out. I may still purchase a small bar fridge and keep them entirely separate. It is gross but worth it.

You can also harvest them at your house if you locate them and they are too far away to pick up monthly. That was beyond my project scope. Paul B is really the expert here...

Try it and I would be interested in your experience...? I am a convert. Still going to QT but I think better nutrition is key.

Neptune
 
I have been feeding blackworms for probably fifty years. I don't keep them in the refrigerator because my wife can probably take me in a fair fight so I built a work keeper where they live happily at room temperature as long as I need to keep them.
All of my paired fish are spawning including mandarins, pipefish, bangai cardinals, ruby red dragonettes, watchman gobies etc.
My fish are and have always been immune from disease so I don't worry about that or quarantining.
 
Nice. Thanks Neptune. That's exactly what I wanted to know. Do you find the black worms at your local LFS? I will see if I can find them here in my area. It looks like the only place in the country that distributes them is in central CA.
Where in Central CA? Live in Modesto.
 
I'll feed live black worms to my fish every now & then, but being fed a diet that consists mainly of dry foods seems to get the job done. My clownfish have been with me for quite awhile now and they spawn on a regular basis too.

@mmw64 The link below might help. The 559 area code is for Fresno and some of the surrounding areas.

http://blackworms-direct.com/LiveBlackwormsM.html
 
I have been feeding exclusively frozen black worms to all my fish for 65 :) years. all are healthy and I've never lost a fish to disease. I have three pair of spawning clowns. in fact back when I was breeding clowns, I attributed black worms for much of my success.

@Paul B got me hooked on them many moons ago.
 
Seahorses and pipefish do not eat worms. I don't know why, but they don't.
Many fish, mostly damsels will spawn on dry foods but many damsels will live on damp sawdust.
I feed the live worms more for the bacteria in their guts than the nutrient value they have. To me, live bacteria is the most important thing we can feed our fish every day and is the sole reason my fish have never been sick.
I am talking 40 years and I do not have to quarantine.
I am not saying you should give up quarantining, that is for another thread.
 
Seahorses and pipefish do not eat worms. I don't know why, but they don't.
Many fish, mostly damsels will spawn on dry foods but many damsels will live on damp sawdust.
I feed the live worms more for the bacteria in their guts than the nutrient value they have. To me, live bacteria is the most important thing we can feed our fish every day and is the sole reason my fish have never been sick.
I am talking 40 years and I do not have to quarantine.
I am not saying you should give up quarantining, that is for another thread.

Aren't some of your fish specialized feeders though, meaning that they rely on a reliable source of pods in their diet to survive? If you take this away then what? (especially the ones that don't eat the worms) Don't you run ozone on your tank too? Isn't this a form of disinfectant? Not so much for parasites, but for other pathogens as well?
 
Almost all fish are specialized feeders which is why I always say that fish don't need a varied diet, they need what they need and only that. Many fish subsist on a single food and don't need anything else. The vast majority of fish eat other (smaller) fish. In the sea, if you dive you will see millions of fry near the bottoms of rocks. That is the main diet of most fish. Fish fry contain everything a fish needs because they are whole fish and contain everything that is in the predator fish. We as aquarists should try to provide the closest thing we can to what the fish was eating in the sea. Lionfish, trumpetfish, groupers eat fish. They need nothing else. Mandarins and other dragonettes need tiny, whole animals and nothing else. In the sea they eat pods or copepods which is a real animal but any tiny creature will suffice. Then also need to eat every few seconds so "training" them to eat frozen foods once or twice a day is a waste of time as they have no stomach in which to store food. Their short intestine was designed to digest a tiny creature thousands of times a day, not to store it like we do.
Pipefish eat a similar diet to mandarines but most pipefish prefer their prey swimming. Dragonettes only eat fro the bottom as they can't really catch anything swimming. I feed my dragonettes new born brine shrimp every day in a feeder I designed, but when that is empty, they hunt pods. I don't keep a sterile tank and think a sterile tank is a silly idea. Many fish need to hunt and hunting on clean sand equals a dead fish. Fish should "only" die of old age, anything else and we failed.
My normal feedings are live blackworms, mainly for the guts and the bacteria in their guts. I also feed clams that I buy live, freeze and shave off paper thin slices. I like clams because you are feeding the entire animal, guts and all which is what fish need. They do not need squid tentacles, shrimp, scallop, octopus or fish fillets because those foods (when you get them in a sea food store) are only the muscles of the animal and not the guts. Fish are not humans, we throw out the guts, but fish need that. To keep fish disease free, eliminate quarantine and have fish only die from old age, that is what you need to do.
Dry foods although they list a bunch of ingredients are dry. Being dry they would lack fish oils and any bacteria. Fish need to eat bacteria every day to remain healthy, immune and spawning. Damsels like clownfish are slightly different and can live forever on flakes. But they will probably not be immune on that diet.

As for ozone, yes I do use that. I have always used it and am not sure if it does anything. It is used to improve water conditions by oxidizing DOC (disolved organic carbon) or fish and food wastes. It will do little to eliminate any diseases. There are amphipods living in my skimmer so I doubt it will kill parasites.
I also don't want to kill parasites or bacteria. (yes you read that correctly) an immune tank depends on parasites to keep the fish immune. There is more to it than I could post here which is why I wrote a book.
(No I don't want you to buy my book, I am just saying that it is too much to post)
I will try to answer any specific questions or I will link to an article I wrote about it (if I am allowed)
See these little "dots"? Those are fish fry and are all over the reef. I think this was Key Largo but they are everywhere. Remember fish in the sea are always pregnant (like your fish should be) and they spawn constantly laying millions of eggs. That is what the majority of fish eat.



Fry to the left of that lazy nurse shark.


This is a pod or copepod.
 
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In this video of my tank from about a year or two ago, you can see almost all the fish hunting. There are some baby brine shrimp in the tank that escaped from the feeder. They are much to small for most of my fish but they eat them anyway. That is what fish in the sea do, they eat constantly very unlike how we feed them in a tank. The best thing is to have a little food available all day.

 
@Paul B thanks so much for your insight! Very helpful. This is the discussion I was hoping to get. Not the easiest way to feed fish but it seems like they do need more than the "sterile" foods we tend to feed them from the store.
 

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