Colour enhancing fish food

did you blanch the veggies??? most fish prefer them blanched to raw...

BTW... sometimes you have to trick / train the fish... I used to have a huge Red Belly Pacu, when I had tanks 20 years ago... as the fish was huge, his color had faded on his belly & tail... in the wild, they eat a lot of roots, & I had been buying color enhancing pellets for him... I tried a carrot one day, & he wouldn't touch it... so the next time I chopped raw carrot, into pieces the size of the red pellets he had been eating... he gobbled them right up, over the weeks, I gradually increased the size of the chunks, until he was chomping whole carrots just like Buggs Bunny... interesting thing, is he colored up like a young Pacu, & you could hear him crunching the carrots through the water & glass, like a rabbit sitting in the room... he may have even gotten more from the carrots, if I had thought of blanching them, prior to feeding... but the crunching of the raw carrots was entertaining...

no I didn’t, I chucked them straight in from dinner. Might explain why.
I’ll be sure to try it.

Magnum Man said:

did you blanch the veggies??? most fish prefer them blanched to raw...

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The Americans have the fish food, the UK has remedies for fish illness, Australia has rainbowfish and Canada has, uh, lots of space.

Canada has a fish keepers treasure.. @GaryE

@GaryE ... & @robbiek22 ... I ran across this when I was looking at food ingredients, & remembered that specific algae... (Astaxanthin)

Aquatic Foods Micro Wafers ( mix of color enhancing & Algae )

Color Wafer Ingredients:
Fish Meal, Extra Equal amounts of Krill, Plankton, Shrimp Meal, Brine Shrimp, Red Shrimp. Astaxanthin (to bring out the colors) Spirulina, Dried Algae, Dried Kelp, Wheat Flour, Soy Meal Brewer’s Yeast Palm Oil-Fish Oil-Lecithin-HUFA oil, Various Multi Vitamins & Multi Minerals.

Algae Wafer Ingredients:
Fish Meal, Spirulina, Rice Flour, Wheat Bran, Soybean Meal, Wheat Germ Meal Gluten Flour, Soy Flour, Freeze Dried Krill, Freeze Dried Plankton. Mixture of Plants and Vegetables Including: powdered Seaweed, Spirulina, Celery, Carrots, Squash, Spinach, Broccoli, Sweet Potato, Tomato, Zucchini, Vegetable Oils, Vitamin & Mineral Supplement. Double Stabilized Vitamin “C”


BTW... I see it's also in the color enhancing Hykari micro pellets that I have already been buying, & were listed 1st on the ingredient sheet I posted in my other thread

also Hykari Vibra bites...

I see Bug Bites has a new color enhancing formula, but they aren't listing ingredients where they can be easily copied... but looks like they are using a different algae to enhance color... Haematococcus Algae, & it's pretty far down on the ingredient statement

and it appears to have a wide range of colors, & other benifits...

@Magnum Man tha k you very much for that. Great observation. I like the look of those vibra bites but can’t seem to locate them easily and priced reasonably in the uk.

I was just reading up on that haemotoccus and it sure looks like a good ingredient. I have been researching more and more since beginning this thread and have noticed that the vast majority are all based around Red. Or the red colour enhancement. Little foods I can have, have equal quantities of the other ingredients we mentioned that focus on colours other than red. Not that I can see anyway.

I contacted New Life Spectrum as the uk ingredients and the US ingredients differ. However they assure me that astaxanthin is present in uk food however it’s branded differently due to EU regulations and British import.

I wonder if there’s a decent all rounder that’s omnivorous or even herbivore friendly?

Not sure if you can get the 1st product I listed above, but it’s a bag of blend of the 2 kinds ( the Aquatic Foods Micro Wafers

Magnum Man said:

Not sure if you can get the 1st product I listed above, but it’s a bag of blend of the 2 kinds ( the Aquatic Foods Micro Wafers

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No I can’t, I can find the food and ingredients online and looks like a decent food to be fair, can’t manage to get it in the uk, well not at present anyway

My understanding is that it's difficult to enhance colours other than red and its allies. Blue and green are very light and reflection dependent. I have blue, violet and green fish that are stunning, but that I can't photograph because they blanch out. I don't have the skills (yet) to arrange secondary flashes and such like the big kids do, and I can't catch the colours. A lot of fish colours are smoke and reflections.
Red and orange though are very diet based. If you have a cardinal tetra, the red is true, but a rainbowfish can really be affected by food.

Both my daughters are very artistic, and the one with a tank sat down and worked out the colours on her adjustable LED, experimenting day by day til she was satisfied with the effects. Her plants grow incredibly well, but she also has amazing colour intensity on her fish. She's gotten about as close as you can get to fish in sunlight. When it comes to colour theory, I'm like a guy painting with a hammer.

I 'blanch' veggie foods by freezing them. The key is to break the internal fibre so the fish can break pieces off. We don't all have big, fruit eating pacus. Frozen then thawed zuccini (courgette?), romaine lettuce and such are great foods. I also feed dulse, a seaweed people eat with their beer around here. Some of the older approaches are sympathetic magic (the food is red so my fish will be red), but a lot of the more researched options are very cool, and may in many cases be found in the natural diet of the fish. When you collect wild fish, they come out of the water in breathtaking colours we can't always maintain. Some of that is how they look in sunlight, in the net, but some of it is nutrition.

The stores around here are selling a Polish brand of foods, and I bought a can of their colour food yesterday. I used it once before, and figure my flake staples can be this and bug bites, with live on a regular basis.

I’ve been trying on the blues, as well, right now my electric blue rams, and Acaras are “brilliant” but at this point, I’m assuming is just from a varied diet ( and their breeding ) but my Zebra Lace Angel seems to be coloring up also… my New Blue Diamond Angel, currently has no blue, so I’m hoping, since it has the genes to get some blue, that I can get that one there… but that color does seem to be more light dependent, than yellows or reds…

I don’t currently have anything that is predisposed towards greens… had green terrors 20 years ago… have thought about trying to add some green lizard Hillstream’s

The algae that Bug Bites is adding, seems to be predominantly reds… but the link does show other colors, so I’d be curious if those are different strains, or environmental conditions, that cause the other colors, and then of course, does the color of the algae even matter???

robbiek22 said:

@Magnum Man tha k you very much for that. Great observation. I like the look of those vibra bites but can’t seem to locate them easily and priced reasonably in the uk.

I was just reading up on that haemotoccus and it sure looks like a good ingredient. I have been researching more and more since beginning this thread and have noticed that the vast majority are all based around Red. Or the red colour enhancement. Little foods I can have, have equal quantities of the other ingredients we mentioned that focus on colours other than red. Not that I can see anyway.

I contacted New Life Spectrum as the uk ingredients and the US ingredients differ. However they assure me that astaxanthin is present in uk food however it’s branded differently due to EU regulations and British import.

I wonder if there’s a decent all rounder that’s omnivorous or even herbivore friendly?

Click to expand...

I've been using Omega One cichlid pellets for my peacock, and I definitely noticed a difference in the first few days. While I can't say it does too much for his blue (he's an OB), his orange look amazing. I'd have to agree with the above responses—lighting and substrate have been the best solutions for me when it comes to bringing the blue out.

I have a can of Tetra Color Select flakes. I have to say I have been using it for the past month, and I have noticed a color difference in my red discus. Plus, all the fish like it too.