Quote:
|
one of our oldest successfull reefers on here PaulB
|
Who you calling old?
I just read Lees original first post from 3 or 4 years ago and he is correct.
I agree with the entire thing. And I rarely agree with anything (especially if Waterkeeper says it) (I really do but I don't let him know, he never reads this stuff anyway, I think he has ghost writers)
Anyway as I have said many times, fish are not people. We can live for 70 or so years on a diet of beer and potato chips (as the Capn does) with very few problems, We may get fat and have an assortment of health problems but looking at us, we may still appear to be healthy.
Fish are quite different. I feel that fish live in good health because of the foods that they eat. Their immune system is limited to diseases that they would encounter in the sea and not really made for aquarium stresses with our fake water and companions from all over the globe.
Like humans they may appear to be healthy but we can't see their immune systems. I don't feel their immune systems will work 100% unless we give them the proper food. Now I know our Mother's always said to us that we need to eat our vegetables to be strong and healthy and that may not be true in humans but fish need the foods they were designed to eat.
Feeding fish a variety of food is no better if the food they need is not in there in sufficient quantities. Copperband butterflies can possably be fed a mixture of pellets, kelp, fish meal, clam etc, (if they will eat it) but most of those ingredients will pass through that fish and do it no good. A fish like a copperband does not need kelp and probably can't dijest it. That fish was built to eat a high protein food like worms. Worms have the oils in them that that fish needs. A mandarin was built to eat pods. Some people have gotten them to eat pellets. As far as I know, pellets don't have squashed pods in them, much of the content of many pellets is fish meal, kelp, shrimp meal, etc. They need pods and they need one about every 15 seconds.
Lionfish need whole saltwater fish. You can feed them goldfish for a few years as I have done but that fish should live 20 years. Does anyone here have a 20 year old lionfish that ate goldfish for all that time?
If you just need your fish to live for a few years and swim around looking bored, then you can feed them KFC if you like. But I want my fish spawning and living long enough that I get tired of loking at them that I give them away. The proper food "for each fish" will "almost" guarantee that that fish does not get sick. I did say "almost".
I myself don't feed my fish as well as I should, it would be very time consuming but I make a good effort. They get live worms almost every day, newborn brine every day (for the small fish) salt water fish eggs a couple of times a week, the rest of the time they get plankton or mysis.
I mainly want to get oil into them as I feel it is the most important thing in their diet and the one element that is most often missing. It comes in worms
Not bloodworms, which are not worms, fish eggs and fish livers.
