Holiday Food

[Fro]

Hello,

Any recommendations for holiday food? I have a 250l freshwater community tank.

Thanks

 

[Andy Sager]

Hello,

Any recommendations for holiday food? I have a 250l freshwater community tank.

Thanks

Are you looking for vacation foods or just something special for the time of the year?

 

[Colin_T]

Are you looking for vacation foods or just something special for the time of the year?

LOL, you smarty bottom

------------------

Hi Fro

If you are going away for 1-2 weeks, don't bother with a holiday/ weekend feeder. Unlike mammals and birds that use most of the food they eat to keep warm, most fish take their body temperature from the surrounding water. this means any food they eat is used for growth and movement. This allows fish to go for weeks or even months with little to no food and not die like people would.

If you are going away for a month or more, then invest in an automatic feeder or get someone to pop in 2-3 times a week and feed the fish. If you have someone feed the fish for you, measure out one feed portions and put them into separate containers. Tell the person to use one container each time they are there. Make sure they understand that and they are not to feed more than one portion. More fish die from overfeeding than starvation.

Things you can do before you go away.
Feed the fish 3-5 times a day for a couple of weeks before you go. This will allow the fish to gain some weight and they can live off the fat reserves while you are away.

Do big water changes and gravel clean the substrate every day or two while feeding more often. This keeps the tank cleaner and reduces the chance of water quality issues.
Make sure any new water is free of chlorine/ chloramine before it's added to the tank.

Clean the filter a couple of days before you go. This means it shouldn't clog up while you're away.

You can add a heap of live aquatic plants a few weeks before you go. The plants will help keep the water cleaner while you are away. If you do add plants, make sure you do it a few weeks before you go so you can monitor them and remove any that aren't doing well. This reduces the chance of plants rotting and causing water quality problems.

If you get plants from a tank that has fish in, they could introduce diseases so rinse and quarantine them for a few weeks before adding to the tank.

Have the aquarium lights on a timer. You can increase lighting times and have the light on for up to 16 hours a day. The extra light will encourage algae and the fish can graze on this.

On the day you leave, give the fish a normal feed, then go and have a nice holiday.

 

[Fro]

This is more about fish survival than roast dinner

 

[Andy Sager]

LOL, you smarty bottom

You'd be surprised at some of the things I have been asked when I was in retail. I wasn't taking any chances.

Auto feeders are definitely a better option than say, those vacation blocks that supposedly dissolve slowly releasing foods. What those blocks don't tell you is that in alkaline water, they barely dissolve.

The best option IMO is having someone come in to feed the fish, remove any deads and just overall check on the tank(s). When I had the hatchery going, I premeasured flake foods into bags then taped them to the tanks with the instruction that only one bag would be fed every 2 days. ( I was gone for 3 weeks.) Since I had fish at different stages of growth, I used different foods so by taping the foods to the tanks, there was no mistaking who got what and no guessing how much was to be fed. The whole object is to take all the guess work out of the task for the other person.

For just a week or so, Colin's response is how I would go. They don't need daily feedings if they are fat and happy before you go.

 

[Colin_T]

You'd be surprised at some of the things I have been asked when I was in retail. I wasn't taking any chances.

LOL, tell me about it. We heard some ripper comments in the shop
We sold pet rats in the shop and the parents would go gross, rats. We would let them pat and hold the rats and most changed their mind after that. But we would regularly get the question, "how do you sex them?" Lift the tail and look. The mum's would go are they its balls? We would say yes. The parents (mum or dad or both) would go "holy crap, look at the size of those nuts". For anyone not familiar with rats, the males have rather large nuts.

We had an older Asian gentlemen who came in each week and bought live blackworms (like tubifex but cleaner). He came in one day and said to one of the young staff members "You got worms?" in reference to do we have live blackworms. I said "of course he's got worms, that's why he's so skinny". The old guy didn't get it but everyone else did.

------------------

Auto feeders are definitely a better option than say, those vacation blocks that supposedly dissolve slowly releasing foods. What those blocks don't tell you is that in alkaline water, they barely dissolve.

The other thing about the vacation blocks is they dissolve a lot quicker in acid water and can release all the food in a few hours. So anyone wanting to use holiday/ vacation food blocks needs to have the pH of their water at 7.0 or the blocks either won't dissolve or dissolve too quickly.

 

[Andy Sager]

I never really had acidic water to test out those vacation blocks. They just never dissolved in my tanks. :^s

 

[Colin_T]

The weekend holiday feeders are made with layers of calcium and food. In acid water the calcium dissolves really quickly and the entire feeding block can vanish in a matter of hours if the pH is low (below 6.5).