Live food question

[Andari]

I'd like to start feeding my fish live food. They've been stuck on Frozen and flake for a while and I'd really like to add more variety to their diet. Can anyone give me advice on how to get live food. I live in the middle of nowhere and can use any tricks of the trade you guys have.

I have 2 clowns and a blue hippo tang

 

[MACATUA]

for those fish I would not go to live food. Just mix up their food with flake, frozen, and give them a good variety. It probobly is not worth the bother. I would only worry about live foods with predators.

HTH

 

[Andari]

Is there a better frozen to go with? They have brime shrimp, veg, and flake.

 

[Feron]

mysids, squid (altho my clowns won't eat squid for some reason) and zooplankton.
All my fish go nuts for zooplankton.
That and cyclopeeze.

Brine shrimp really are pointless unless you are gut loading em (very low protein content)

I'd replace the flakes with cyclopeeze and the brine with mysids and just forgo the squid.
Obviously the tang needs seaweed too.
Zooplankton as a treat (it's relatively cheap from drfostersmith and doesn't incur high shipping charges cause it's bottled, not frozen).

 

[rayjay]

Brine shrimp really are pointless unless you are gut loading em (very low protein content)

Just have to try to clear up this misconception about protein and live brine shrimp.
Juvenile and adult protein level is higher than many foods we feed our tanks, with many of them averaging around the 45% mark. Cultured and wild brine (great salt lake) protein levels start around 50% and go a little over 60% for cultured, and near 70% for wild.
NUTRITIONAL PROPERTIES OF ONGROWN BRINE SHRIMP
This is taken from an article written for the United Nations on live foods for the aquaculture industry. The complete article can be seen at this link, with the artemia part at section 4.0
CLICK HERE AND SCROLL DOWN TO 4.0

 

[Feron]

I was specifically talking frozen brine, which is more convenient, but even the enriched version of adult brine is at best 12-15% protein.

Your article is correct, the juvenile and adult live cultured shrimp fed a proper diet (gut loading long term) is high in protein, but the frozen stuff is generally just like feeding the fish potato chips.

 

[rayjay]

If you go back and read again you will find that those values are for normally fed brine and wild brine, none of them gut loaded. Gut loading adds to those values given.
As for frozen figures, the packaging is misleading because the brine shrimp industry chose eons ago, to give values based on total packaging. In other words, the protein is a percentage of all the brine as well as the processing and packaging fluids.
Mysid shrimp on the other hand, like most other foods, give values for "dry weight" even though they are not "dry" when packaged.
When you compare "dry weight percentages" for all foods, frozen brine is still varying but around the 50% range, when no enrichment has been done.
If you were to take spirulina flake that I use for instance, and wet it in the tank, and then give the protein level as a percentage of the total, you will now be down under 10% just like frozen brine shrimp. The same applies for other dry foods.
What it boils down to then, is comparing apples to apples, not apples to oranges, which is what you do when you compare wet weight percentages to dry weight percentages. The water content is a tremendous portion of the weight and some companies were smart enough to list the dry weights, knowing many would compare those figures to wet weight numbers and be misled.