Feeding Your Algae Grazing Fish

[Miss Wiggle]

things like pygmy angels that need to constantly graze on algae, how often do you add food for them? I've been putting seaweed in daily and trying to do it twice a day when i remember and get a chance as I've been worried about our Eibli not getting enough food. we initially thought he was eating the corals but have learnt since he was probably just underfed, putting more food in does seem to be stopping him from munching on the corals but i was just wondering how often we should be putting food in and how often you guys all do.

also as a sort of side issue, when we go on holiday we were plannign on setting up an atumoatic feeder to drop some flake/pellet food in every day, not ideal btu betetr than starving. Is it OK to just cut up the seaweed stuff into little bits and put this in the autofeeder? i was also thinking about upping the lighting to encourage more algae while we're away so he's more to graze on but then you get more evaporation..... what about maybe removing the phosphate remover? or is it just plain asking for trouble encouraging algae growth at all as we're not having any algae issues and i don't wanna revert to having them!

got like 6 months before our next proper holiday so plenty of time to plan things, I'm just stressing a bit much I think.

 

[BlondeBrutality]

The only 2 in my tank that eat the seaweed is my yellow tang and my cleaner shrimp. I wondered the same thing, if my tang was getting enough since I found my eiblii dead, don't know if the tang bit him cause he ate his seaweed, or if the tang wanted more than seaweed, even though he's a veggie. I put seaweed in there twice a day and its always eatten. Do you feed your eiblii formula one pellets? (If you even have that where you live...??) mine loved them. Hope this make sense, its early for me and I feel like I'm rambling...

 

[Miss Wiggle]

not heard of forula one pellets, although thinking about it i'm sure we can get some sort of algae/seaweed pellets which would be much easier to give in an automatic feeder, would the eibli eat something like that?

 

[BlondeBrutality]

It will probably eat the pellets. Formula one is for omnivores, its what my clowns eat, but the eiblii really seemed to enjoy them.

Edit: I just read the container, its for herbivores/omnivores. It contains shrimp meal, plankton, sardine meal, wheat flour, salmon egg oil,lecithin, spirulina, fish oil, garlic, minerals.... and so on, but those are the main ingredients.. Sounds yummy!

 

[SkiFletch]

It can eat as much seaweed as it can stuff in its stomach . There's not a lot of nutritional value in the seaweed, but it does keep the fish full and prevent it from nipping rocks/corals in search of a full belly. The real key is just make sure you feed enough that the fish can eat it all. Dont want your water fouled by large amounts of rotting seaweed.

As for going away, yeah dump some pellet, flake, and crushed up seaweed in that autofeeder and set it to go off multiple times per day if you can.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

cool, i'll investigate some pellets and try him on them then

 

[Matthew5664]

I'm using algea wafers that my Plec (FW) had, crush them up with a packet of Nori from the supermarket (chop it up into bite size pices's) that will sort them out!