Best live food?

[CaptMicha]

I want to start offering my fish some live food in addition to their wafers, flakes, tabs, pellets and plants. I have smaller fish so please keep that in mind. I have banjo cats (largest) to pygmy cories (smallest).

I only really want to keep one live culture on hand and I want it to be easy, cheap (hopefully!), healthy(very important) and will work for all my fish.

I don't want grindal worms because they're supposed to be dirty. Black worms can make fish sick (so I read), scuds would probably be too large, blood worms and mosquito larvae would be too difficult since they have flying stages, I don't want beetles or gnats or fruit flies, daphnia is kind of expensive (or is it?).

I'm not trying to be difficult! I swear!

 

[MichaelsLilGray]

try crickets... small crickets lol.. or possibly the 22 cent ghost shrimp

 

[CaptMicha]

Ghost shrimp are way too big.

 

[BrianNY]

Live brine shrimp would make a nice occasional treat and are relatively inexpensive or easy to culture. The advantage of brine shrimp is that being salt water animals, you don't risk adding anything unwanted to the tank.

 

[bs6749]

Brine shrimp (BBS) are nutritional for about a day or so and after that they are pretty much good for only providing roughage to the fish. They don't have very much to offer and are mostly exoskeleton. If you could purchase frozen spiulina loaded brine shrimp that would be much better. Live black worms are one of the best live foods to feed and are pretty easy to find. You could also look at white worms, good old fashioned earth worms, red worms, etc.

Just wondering why you think they need live foods? You can get frozen bloodworms fairly cheaply and they'd be an excellent food source for your fish. The main reasons that people feed live foods is to get picky eaters to eat right away. You don't need to feed live foods though and there are plenty of great options to choose from as far as frozen foods goes. Look into frozen cyclops as well for great fry growth and enhancing oranges/reds in your fish.

If you REALLY want a culture though, white worms would be a good one as would black worms.

 

[BrianNY]

In truth bs6749 is correct. Unless you're trying to prod picky eaters to eat, or have predatory fish that will only eat a moving target, the commercially prepared and frozen foods are more than adequate. Still some people feel the need to pamper their fish and feel like treating them with live foods every so often. It often makes us feel better to treat our fish special.

 

[bs6749]

Most fish WILL chasing things that move out of "natural curiosity" and they will try to eat them. Take for example when I introduced neon tetras to my discus tank 3 weeks ago. As far as I know my discus have never been in a tank with smaller fish and they were extremely interested in them when I first put them into the tank. I had a school of 25+ in my 100g and about 7 of my discus would chase them down. It was really interesting to see this behavior ouf of them...something that would be seen generally in the wild. They'd get up behind the tetras and then almost lay horizontally when they attacked. One of my pigeon bloods was absolutely fascintated by them and wouldln't leave them alone for 4 days! The others stopped after the 2nd day and I probably lost 15 of the fish. Now my discus pay no attention to the neons even after I've upped the school to 40+.

Sorry for the rambling, just wanted to share an experience with "live food" in one of my tanks. It can bring out some cool behavior in your fish, especially if the food is more difficult to eat/catch.