What’s your recipe?

[alannasfishies]

So with all the commercial foods around, I also regularly see people make their own food. I’m thinking I may try my hand at making my own fish food.

So I ask, what’s your recipe? What tips do you have for those looking to make their own (i.e. only this type of shrimp or make sure it doesn’t contain x)? Thanks!

When I had a Moorish idol I used to make him imitation sponges to eat. He lived with me for five years then I gave him away to a local fish keeper as I was heading to college. While i wouldn’t own one again (he was a gift to me from my boyfriend at the time, and I don’t feel he wasn’t fully happy in captivity), I adored him and wanted to keep him alive. He would not accept frozen or pellets or anything, but he of course ate sponges. When I ran out of those this is what I made:

I used to dehydrate a sponge from one of my tanks that was covered in them. After it was dehydrated I would grind it into a powder in a small food processor I had just for my pets food.

I would use one of those grinding dishes to grind a piece of calpura into a gooey type of paste. I would also grind thawed frozen mysis in with this paste. The calpura kind of had a gelatin like consistency.

I would mix this with the powder and leave it out in the sun (was living in Miami) and sort of knead it until it was a clay type consistency. Then I would add some animal safe yellow pigment (yellow fish flakes) and press an art sponge on the surface to give it a textured surface. I would stick this all over the rock. He ate it voraciously. I instructed his new keeper and he did the same for two years until a power outage lead to the idol dying.

I mostly use masstick for my orange spotted filefish but if I ran out I would do the same! On their first day I shaped it around the base of some softies and they ate away at it. I think that masstick is basically the same thing but probably more nutritious