Live food

[ddodad]

My go to lfs has closed their doors, I guess keeping immaculate tanks, healthy fish, honest advice and good prices didn't work.

My issue besides feeling bad for them is I used to get live brine shrimp, and black worms for my community tank. I am pretty sure my tank will be fine with the quality flake, frozen bloodworms and veggie wafers. I was told not to use frozen brine shrimp in freshwater I feel quite knowledgable with most aquarium issues but nutrition is not my forte, what do you guys think?as

 

[Old Scales]

Frozen brine shrimp is just fine for FW unless you feed massive amounts and every day.
It is recommended to feed a quality flake or pellet food 75% and frozen or live food 25% of the time as the better commercial foods have vitamins and minerals that give the fish a healthier diet than just live/frozen foods alone. I feed my community tank frozen bloodworms or brine shrimp 3x a week and rotate between Omega flakes and New Life Spectrum pellet food the rest of the time. I've had the same fish almost 8 months now without a single death after the first week of purchase.
You can get a brine shrimp hatchery kit, they are fun to mess with. Dig up some earthworms and purge them in water for 12 hrs, cut into little pieces and watch your fish go crazy for them. Also a neat trick if you live where there are mesquitos, is to get a really white 2 gal bucket, put in some rain or dechlorinated water outside so algae can grow in it. After a while you will see little mesquito larvae wiggling just under the water. Scoop some up with a fine net, rinse briefly under the tap and then feed to your fish. Live foods are a nice treat to mess with but with today's technology is by no means neccessary.
Good luck, OS.

 

[ddodad]

Thanks OS
I was feeding one day pellet, one day live/frozen then one day flake for six days then fast one day. I might try the brine shrimp hatchery idea, but for sure I'm going to dig up some earth worms.

My issue was I got spoiled with that store it was on my way home from work and they would have live foods all the time do free for the regulars. I currently have 2 tanks running one for just over a year without any real deaths and the other for
4 months without any deaths and the fish look great and want to keep it that way

 

[dragonfisher33]

what fish do you have? you can always go to local pond or body of water and find some daphnia. they're easy to culture as well. i feed my fish live daphnia, blackworms, and frozen brine shrimps and frozen bloodworms.

 

[ddodad]

what fish do you have? you can always go to local pond or body of water and find some daphnia. they're easy to culture as well. i feed my fish live daphnia, blackworms, and frozen brine shrimps and frozen bloodworms.

My current stock is:
1 butterfly pleco
10 harlequin rasbonas
6 boesmani rainbows
2 GBRs
2 Bolivian rams
4 oto cats
2 leopard synodontis(not sure spelling)

That's the plan I'm going to have to culture some