Fatty diets?

[SDguy]

A few recent thread got me thinking. Are some of the foods we use (like PE mysis and such) good for long term use in a fish's diet? I know it's one thing when you are trying to fatten up a newly imported specimen, but what about for long term use (years and years).

Back when I kept reptiles, there were issues with certain foods (mice, wax worms) and fatty livers. I'm guessing something like PE mysis has WAY more fat and protein than a tunicate or a sponge or a coral polyp.

Any thoughts on this suject?

[jmaneyapanda]

In particular, with sponge and tunicate eaters, I think fatty livers a play a big role in premature death. However, necropsies are rarely, if ever conducted on our fish, so it would all be speculation.

[tcmfish]

That pic I posted on another thread was from Matt Wittenrich's book, and he has said brine shrimp is very fatty, along with squid like the example of the watchman goby. But what we would always use in the lab and wouldn't be hard for anyone else is just buy lots of fresh shrimp and put them in a tall preferably narrow cup, fill it with water but not quite to the top and freeze it, then get the ice/shrimp out of the cup and use a cheese grater to get fine pieces of food to feed to the fish. If you have larger fish you can just cut up chunks of shrimp or use one of the bigger sides of the cheese grater. If you do it over a cuttingboard then you can just take the pile of food and go feed your fish.

You can use other foods, but shrimp seems to be the best. He has a nice chapter in there called condition broodstock with lots of info on fish foods.

[SDguy]

That pic I posted on another thread was from Matt Wittenrich's book, and he has said brine shrimp is very fatty, along with squid like the example of the watchman goby. But what we would always use in the lab and wouldn't be hard for anyone else is just buy lots of fresh shrimp and put them in a tall preferably narrow cup, fill it with water but not quite to the top and freeze it, then get the ice/shrimp out of the cup and use a cheese grater to get fine pieces of food to feed to the fish. If you have larger fish you can just cut up chunks of shrimp or use one of the bigger sides of the cheese grater. If you do it over a cuttingboard then you can just take the pile of food and go feed your fish.

You can use other foods, but shrimp seems to be the best. He has a nice chapter in there called condition broodstock with lots of info on fish foods.

LOL< that is almost exactly how and what I feed my fish mostly :lol: . Shrimp and scallop from the grocery store.

[snorvich]

Great idea guys, but my wife might go ballistic if I were shaving shrimp in her kitchen for the fish.

[LobsterOfJustice]

Interesting because people are always recommending soaking foods in selcon etc...

I guess what you want to do is match what your fish is naturally eating. I feel most are planktivores and eat copepods etc so shrimp would probably be a good match. Some obviously have algae mixed in with that, which we can somewhat easily replicate (I would think that we should strive for more plant diversity than nori alone though). Something like chopped fish flesh probably isnt the best substitute because they dont eat a lot of fish flesh naturally. Or squid, bivalve, etc.