Maintaining your aquarium tropical fish’s health and happiness requires providing them with the correct diet. Fortunately, there are plenty of options to choose from when it comes to selecting food for them.
Common tropical fish foods include dry, frozen, and live sources. These provide your tropical fish with essential protein, fats, vitamins, and minerals.
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Dry Foods
Dry foods provide essential vitamins, proteins and minerals for fish. They’re also an ideal way to incorporate different ingredients into your fish’s diet.
Fish food comes in various forms, such as flakes, pellets and granules. Some of these options include sinking or floating varieties ideal for bottom feeders like plecos and African butterfly fish.
Flakes are a widely-used dry fish food option for most common aquarium tropical fish. Available in an array of colors, you can select one with color-enhancing flake to complement your fish’s natural appearance.
It is essential to feed small amounts several times a day. Avoid overfeeding, as left over flake food will settle at the bottom of the tank and pollute its water.
Frozen Foods
Frozen fish foods are an easy, convenient way to provide your aquarium tropical fish with a nutrient-rich basic diet or supplement flake or pellet foods. Often they come in pre-measured cubes that can be dropped directly into the tank after thawing.
Quality frozen food products often elicit an intuitive response and tempt even the pickiest fish species to happily consume it. This is because frozen foods often trigger a natural energetic eating response similar to what fish experience when fed in their natural habitat.
There is a wide range of frozen foods available for fish of all sizes. Minuscule items, like baby brine shrimp (Artemia nauplii) or cyclops; vitamin-enriched brine shrimp, bloodworms, white mosquito larvae and Mysis shrimp; large varieties like krill, shrimp cockles and mussels with special formulas designed specifically for carnivores or herbivores alike.
Wafers
When keeping bottom feeders and algae eaters in your freshwater tank, wafers may be beneficial to supplement their diet. These disc-shaped sinking foods are ideal for grazing fish and invertebrates because they dissolve slowly, are easily digestible, and don’t cloud the water.
Hikari Grazing Wafers are a natural food designed specifically for plecostomus and other bottom feeders. Made with premium algae, kelp, and other essential nutrients to promote your fish’s health, these wafers will keep your aquatic friends thriving.
This food also contains spirulina and other algae to promote vibrant coloration. Furthermore, it helps support a healthy digestive system – especially important for bottom-feeding fish.
These wafers are produced using a low-heat cooking process that keeps more vitamins and nutrients intact. This makes them an excellent choice for all tropical fish species, such as shrimp or snails.
Live Foods
Live foods, unlike dry food, are unprocessed and reflect your tropical fish’s natural diet. They’re packed with protein and other essential nutrients that prepared foods may lack.
Foods such as these stimulate the hunting instinct and provide essential roughage, micronutrients and trace elements not found in commercially prepared foods. Furthermore, they are more palatable to most wild caught saltwater fish, particularly those that reject dried or frozen options like Annual Killifish, Cichlids or African Butterfly Fish.
Culture a variety of microorganisms for use in aquariums, such as White Worms, Daphnia, Brine Shrimp and Gammarus Shrimp. These can be grown on Coconut Fiber or peat moss bedding in small containers.
