How do I feed fish? If you visit a number of pet stores and ask this question, chances are you will receive a variety of different answers. Always remember, Fish keeping is as much an art as it is a science.
We can only really offer you the ways we have used over the past four and a half decades when feeding all types of fish. While there are always exceptions to any rule for aquarists to us, the best advise we can offer is the rule of thumb:
Feed fish as much as they can eat in TWO MINUTES - with nothing hitting the bottom.
Anything left over after this short period is wasted. Anything that is wasted will eventually get lodged in the bottom and rot. It is so much better and effective to be sure that the fish get only what they actually need and very little extra, if any extra food at all.
These guidelines, of course, are meant for a standard aquarium community, such as the common passive tropical fish set up. This is not meant for special cases, such as one where fry are being grown out. Fry generally require access to food many more times than their adult counterparts.
In addition, it is not uncommon for grow-out aquariums to be poorly filtered as well, due to the size of the babies. Fry tanks are often not the picture of perfection visually and are regularly overfed - sometimes up to six times a day!
It is commonly felt that every time you feed fish they seem starved, but this is not really a function of hunger. Rather, it is the physiological fact that they have no homeostatic control to tell them thay are full, like we as humans do.
In their natural habitat, fish never know when they are going to find their next meal. They may be left hungry for days if they are unlucky in their pursuit of food. As such, they are programmed to eat as much as possible whenever there is food available. They will keep doing that time after time.
I have seen fish act as if they are starved even after previously being fully fed at intervals of about five minutes - in some cases they will actually eat until they explode - don't allow that to happen.
Earlier videos mentioned the fact that fish are poikilothermic and have their temperature regulated by their surroundings. They require much less food than mammals, who burn most of their calories to heat and maintain a carefully regulated body temperature.
Don't feed fish like you would a person. Feed the fish once a day. You can even occasionally skip a day as well. When you put in the daily portion of fish food, watch carefully to ensure they are actually eating all of it. See that nothing remains on the ground after the feeding period is over.
We generally ignore any community bottomfish when performing the regular daily feeding. If they are special feeders, they should be fed separately, not at the same time as swimmers.
Generally they will tend to ignore flakes or other prepared foods in preference for scavenging the wastes from other fish anyway. If you try to feed them as well, you will overfeed and leave a lot of wastes in the tank to rot.
The really frustrating thing is that food in new condition is mostly ignored by the scavengers and simply rots as time goes by.
Do your fish a favor, feed them once a day, as much as they can eat in two minutes with nothing hitting the bottom or left over.
Ignore the scavengers. Let them do their job and scavenge the tank to keep it clean. If the food remains longer after a feeding, cut back the amount the next time. You should identify the correct amount they will eat in the allotted time frame, and then provide that amount every day.
