Feeding Your Fish Garlic?

[paw-paw]

I am feeding my guppies garlic...

I bought them in a store, and all but one died from mysterious disease. They died one by one. The remainig fish I started to feed with garlic. Actually I cut the garlic in half and put it in the tank for her to nibble.

Than she had babies, and now I have a lot of guppies I give them garlic twice a month. It is supposed to be antiparasitic and it is natural antibiotic. I also have otos and none of them died. But I haven't seen them eating garlic...

 

[Azaezl]

I too thought this was some silly idea that someone had made up until I saw this post and the link kindly provided by wilder. I will definately not be offering my fish garlic after reading through all that.

IMO it's all coincidence and as the article rightly pointed out;

while many hobbyists report using garlic and then noticing an increase in feeding activity, there is no conclusive proof to this claim, either. It could be that the pungent and/or unrecognized/unnatural smell of the garlic brought the fish over to investigate the food, but there is no way of knowing whether or not they would have eaten food not treated with garlic, or whether or not any strong-smelling food additive would have done the same thing. It could also simply be that enough time had elapsed that the fish was finally prepared to eat and adding garlic was just a coincidence. Frankly, there are far too many variables to conclusively evaluate these claims

Taking these points in order, first garlic has never been conclusively proven to cure Marine Ich (Cryptocaryon irritans), ever. Some hobbyists have used it and reported that their fish got better, but these are not controlled studies and none of these hobbyists know for certain if their fish's own natural immunity was the true reason for the cure, or if garlic had any impact whatsoever. Also, there are a number of hobbyists which have used garlic and suffered significant losses of fish as well.

This brings me to my real point, which is that this highly flawed study is no better or worse than someone saying, "My fish would not eat. Then I added garlic extract to their food and they now eat great!" These reports are practically meaningless. Just as we cannot draw any conclusions from this public aquarium trial, nor can we draw any conclusions from similar unfounded statements made online

Until there have been some very indepth studys of using garlic on a 'hobbyist' level, as in not injecting it into the fish or directly onto the bacteria etc then I will not be using it

 

[LauraFrog]

No time right now to read the article, and my fish behave like pigs without garlic.

A hint for anybody who wants to try this:
I have used garlic juice in cooking. Cut up the garlic, place the flat of the knife against it on a hard surface, and press down hard on it to get the juice out. Don't use a grainy cutting board or you will never get the garlic juice out of the pores.