Your betta's basic diet

[PoseidonCichlid]

I've read about feeding bettas bloodworms when you condition them for breeding but what about their basic diet if you don't plan on breeding them? Is your typical flake food acceptable? Sinking sticks or pellets? What are you feeding your bettas? Thanks.

 

[dragon14]

Bettas generally don't like flakes. Freeze dried blood worms and frozen bloodworms are great. Small betta pellets (Aquenon has a small betta pellet) are usually what is fed to them. Be careful to not over feed and fast your betta one day a week. It is good for them and helps clean out their system I usually give my female betta 1 freeze dried bloodworm in the morning and one or two pellets at night. Usually just one.

 

[fishychick]

I feed my betas flakes. I know most people say betts prefer pellets but for some reason my guys won't eat them. I give live blood worms as an occasional treat or when their appetite is not great, but I don't give them blood worms on a regular basis. I agree with dragon14 not overfeeding is really important and I don't feed one day a week. And every once in a while I'll give mine a little bit of the inside of a frozen pea. That is supposed to be good for their digestion, unless anyone on here has heard differently.

 

[Fishfur]

I prefer to feed them as much live food as possible. In nature, they are insectivores, eating any insect that gets close enough to catch.

I feed fruit flies [ flightless], springtails, the flies' larvae, and black worms, along with some frozen bloodworms and frozen Brine shrimp. I also buy some live brine shrimp now and then, for a change.

Two of my four will not eat pellets.. or anything man made, most of the time. So the live foods are pretty much my only choice for these two. I feed Hikari betta pellets to the other two, but only once or twice a week. I feed once a day, but their live foods mostly survive for days, if not weeks, so they hunt them later on.

I also feed scuds.. these are tiny shrimp like critters, one of my Bettas just loves going after them to the point he's wiped out the population in his 5G tank entirely. I have to find some more and culture them so he can have some, but not all, of them.

 

[trennamw]

I used Tetra betta pellets at first. They're nice in that there is almost no waste. The quality isn't amazing though.

I tried New Life Spectrum Betta pellets but they've been too big for all my bettas. So now I give them a tiny amount of New Life spectrum Thera A 0.5mm pellets twice a day.

Strangely none of my fish go for frozen bloodworms and stuff as much as the Thera A. Maybe it's the garlic in the pellets.


Sent from my iPhone with three hands tied behind my back.

 

[aqua_holic]

It's not the quantity of food that causes problems, but rather the quality of food. A fish can gorge itself on an easily digestible food like NLS and be fine, whereas a low quality food tends to cause digestive issues. If I recall correctly the hikari betta food is one of the worst I've ever seen. Read the label and you'll see why.

A high quality staple food should be the bulk of the fishs diet, supplemented by frozen foods and whatnot. But a diet of mainly frozen foods is not nutritionally complete.

That is unless you want to go the natural route that was described earlier.