Over Feeding And It's Hazards

[markandhisfish]

very interesting reading this. i surely overfeed my fish . i usually feed in the morning and again in the evening . particularly interested regarding the digestional tract of the fish not being able to absorb all the nutrients from a mass feeding.
as for the effects on growth rates i think it would be very interesting to set up 2 tanks and have a fish of the same species in each, feed 1 as most of us do and 1 in the methods stated in your post and record and compare growth rates water quality health etc etc .

 

[coldcazzie]

I probably underfeed rather than overfeed - my fish are lucky if they get fed 2 days in a row, it's usually every other day, sometimes every 3-4 days, depending on what else is going on. To be honest, I'd rather have them slightly hungry than have an ammonia spike. Whenever they do feed there's always a frenzy, with them snatching food all over the place! Sometimes I feed them and then think afterwards that I've overfed them, and then they don't get any more for a couple of days.

Interesting about the intestinal tract though. Will definitely remember that if I'm ever trying to condition any fish.

 

[Tortea]

Try to explain this to a dad, it i impossible/

 

[Rafael Dilone]

Very nicely written. Many people make the mistake of overfeeding their fishes. I personally tend to feed them very small amounts of food and once they have eaten them all i feed them some more. Doing this for an interval of about 4 minutes. That is the only time i feed them.

 

[kribensis12]

Thanks guys! I hope this has helped some of you! Or at least gotten you to think about what you put in your tank.

 

[mr130gallon]

i think ill be feeding my fish less now lol, at least i only feed my fish once a day instead of twice, now i just need to feed less at a time.

 

[kribensis12]

There is now problem with feeding them often. I could feed my fish 10 times a day and have no problems. It's HOW MUCH you feed at a time.

 

[mr130gallon]

yeah,i have a fair amount of fish in my tank so i think i need to feed them lots, ill experiment to see how little i can feed them

 

[kribensis12]

I would feed them until they are not agressively eating. Then feed them later that day, until they are not agressively eating. That's what I do. They are still hungry, but they are not dying from hunger. They are already starving, 4 hours after being fed once.

 

[kribensis12]

I'm just going to give this thread a little bit of a bump. I think it can help several aquarists out there.

 

[mr130gallon]

yeah, good idea, though i would suspect that fish food manufacturers wouldnt like a thread like this lol

 

[three-fingers]

Tbh I thought this was common knowledge.

I, like basically everyone, "over feed" my fish. Even though I miss out feeding a couple of days a week usually, when I don't feel like feeding for one reason or another.

I will also continue to do so since it does my fish no harm, I enjoy feeding them, and the excess nutrients are "eaten up" by my plants anyway.

Most people who over feed don't have a problem because the standard filter/water changes take care of any potential water quality problems. Over feeding a little is no big deal, unless your very tight on funds and dont want to go through fish food that fast.

In some set-ups,over feeding is essentially necessary to make sure all the fish get food.

When it comes to fry, feeding them often is more important than how much they eat in one sitting obviously.

 

[OldMan47]

As Krib started out saying, it is not how much the fish eat as much as the amount that they don't eat. The excess food ends up in the filter which is really still in the tank as far as water quality is concerned. It sits in the filter and decomposes to produce ammonia. Since the ammonia is in excess of what the tank would otherwise produce, it places an unnecessary load on the filter bacteria and , more importantly, it makes the nitrates in the tank water rise faster than they need to. This is an increase in the effective bio-load with no increase in stocking levels. Why would you want to do that?

 

[three-fingers]

Well, I personally want to do it to feed my plants.

But for others with no plants, I'm just saying it's not really worth worrying about ro this extent.

If your filter cant take a little bit of extra ammonia...what's going to happen to the tank if a fish dies, or a poorly-chosen plant species begins to rot?

As for the nitrates, not really worth worrying about either IMO, if you don't have plants, the average aquarium should be getting water changes to keep the nitrates down as low as needed.

Unless we're talking about some marine systems with corals, but even then it's not a big deal in some cases, depending on the setup of the system.

The only time overfeeding is an issue IMO is when someone's cycling a tank with fish, or is just adding fish to an unstable newly cycled tank.

This part in particular seems unfounded and OTT:

When the food goes in your filter, it just breaks down. Which is a personal invitation to all bad bacteria. Why may lead to help problems in your fish, like internal and external bacterial infections.

 

[kribensis12]

When food goes into your filter, it DOES breakdown. That all it can do. When it breaks down, bad bacteria fester in it. It's kind of like throwing an apple on the floor and letting it rot. Cockroaches and other disease carrying bugs come to it. When they start multiplying, the odds of your fish getting a internal or external bacterial infection are a lot higher than they should be normally.