Published By: dominic7 Oct 2021
Maintaining a thriving aquarium filled with a diverse variety of fish is all about balance.
This can include ensuring that the aquarium’s PH level,solute content, water temperature and overall water quality, but it also includes the number of fish in your tank and how they are fed.
Particular for novices, one of the first questions they will ask when they buy a fish is how often they should feed them aquarium fish food, a question that can vary a great deal depending on the type of fish you buy.
One danger you often find with domesticated pets in general but fish, in particular, is overfeeding, which is easy to do due to underestimating the difference in appetites but can potentially cause them to die.
In many tanks, particularly if there are plants or rocks in the tank, it is better to underfeed fish than overfeed them.
Here are some of the telltale signs your fish are being overfed besides them looking more rounded.
They Beg For Food
Fish are driven by the instinct to eat and most of their actions will be based on how they can scavenge food.
In the wild, this means they have to dig into every corner of the seabed looking for algae, crustaceans and the remnants of other fish to eat, but in an aquarium, they know as soon as a person arrives, the next step is that they will get food.
If they start snapping at the surface, that does not necessarily mean they are actually hungry but instead are simply acting on learned behaviours. Do not add any more food than you usually would.
You Add A Snack For Later
If you feed your fish once a day, it can be tempting to assume fish behave like we do and will get hungry later and need something to graze on.
However, in practice, fish food that is not eaten will simply collapse and dissolve in the water, so there is no point in adding food they cannot eat.
If you must feed your fish more than once a day, then automatic feeders are available which will drop food into the tank at certain times of the day.
Food Has Sunk To TheBottom
They call it a feeding frenzy for a reason. Fish will rush at flakes for about a minute after they drop into the tank and then leave the rest because fish flakes easily soften and decay at the bottom of the tank, where fish tend to ignore them.
Try to avoid putting too much food down, but if you need food to reach the bottom, such as to feed bottom-feeding fish, use sinking pellets and target them directly.
Water Quality Problems
Fish flakes decompose quickly, and this can have major implications for the quality of water in your aquarium.
The biggest telltale sign of this is cloudy water, which is caused by fish food decaying and feeding bacteria that overwhelm the tank.
As well as this, however, a low PH (caused by acidic decomposition), issues with ammonia and nitrites as well as dirty gravel at the bottom of the tank can all cause issues.
