A unique aspect to live feeding are culturing live food. What’s the big deal? Well, it isn’t about nutrition alone.
You’ll also notice an increase in activity with your fishes. Colors is sharper and movement becomes purposeful. You see them engaging in hunting behavior you don’t get with dry flake foods.
How to Culture Live Fish Food At Home
Benefits of Live Feeding for Fish
It’s like having your own little garden growing, a garden that sustains your fish and makes your routines less duller. At first, it appear as though the barrier to entry for this naturaly process is very high. Where do you start?
What’s the recipe? People gives conflicting advice on the internet. There are complicated instructions.
They warn of ammonia spikes that sound like something you don’t want. Truth be told, culturing live food take some observation and patience. It has less to do with chemistry and more with developing an ecosystem within itself.
How to Culture Brine Shrimp
This isn’t a laboratory; it’s a small environment you’re managing. First: What’s going to be grown? Consider your fish: Do you have delicate betta fry?
Small fry? Something else? Whatever it is, you want something they can easily digest as food.
And brine shrimp (Artemia) are best for that. It’s a salt-water creature that will hatch in fresh water. That means it’s clean for your fresh water tank.
How do you go about it? It is easy: dissolve some non-iodized salt in some warm water. Place the solution in an hatching jar along with an air stone.
Put the eggs in there. Wait 24 hours. Voila!
You’ve got swimming larvae. The secret are to get the salt level just right. This duplicates their ocean home and promotes good hatching.
Raising Daphnia as Live Food
For the big fish: One of the benefits of daphnia (which are also known as water fleas) is that they’re small crustaceans. That means they’re easy to raise in mass quantity compared than brine shrimp. And they’re simple to keep indoors on your sunny windowsill or outside in a 5 gallon bucket.
All you need is a food source and some aged tap water. Algae powder or baker’s yeast is good choices for a food source. If conditions is good, daphnia can explode in numbers.
That is great, as long as you feed a lot of them. And do you know what that means? You have to harvest regular!
Maintaining Culture Health and Routine
If not, the water quality will collapse. The other area of struggle for most newbies is keeping the culture alive. That is not the right term.
Keeping it alive mean you think it has an end date. It’s a constant cycle. Monitor the water but don’t get obsessed with it.
Ammonia spikes and changes in temperature kills stock in an instant. Slow starvation will eventually do the trick too. Routine is the solution.
Every time you feed your fish, harvest half of what’s in the tank. Then replace that harvested water with clean (dechlorinated) water. That top-off get rid of the waste products.
It keeps nutrient level balanced. Doing this little routine every day gives you a never-ending supply of free food. You’ll also find yourself battling contamination.
Preventing Contamination in Live Food
Your cultures can becomes overrun with algae blooms, mites, etc. The best defenses against this are cleanliness and isolation. Maintain separate culture containers from your primary tank. Also have separate equipment/tools when harvesting.
If you notice something wrong (like a change in smell or fuzzy growth), act immediatly. Partial water changes along with lessened feedings tend to fix the problem. Better to lose a batch than contaminate your display tank.
Getting Started with Live Food
Live food cultures are an investment in your fish’s health. They makes feeding time less of a chore and more of an event. You’ll see how well your fishes do in ways you can’t duplicate with commerical foods.
Initial set up require an afternoon. Maintenance only costs a few minutes per day. The payoff is a tank that are active, alive and connected to nature.
Begin with a simple brine shrimp hatchery. Master the basics. Then grow it out.
You’ll notice your fish have more color and activity.
