Reef nutrition

Feeding Chat

MolaMola

MolaMola

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Searched past threads and found some good info but I still would like to hear what people do for feeding their tanks if they are willing to post anything. I will share the info with my students as we start setting up our protocols.
How often?
What types of foods?
Thoughts about automatic feeders, especially when you are away for the weekend or longer?
How do you gauge amount of food to add?

We have been feeding our 105g (live rock with mostly inverts) and 12g clown pair tank like this:
2-3 times per week hand-feed inverts and fish homemade frozen fish/shrimp mix
daily - PhytoFeast and OysterFeast 3+ tsps total (ok-we just squirt without measuring so amount unknown)
just started - rotifers - will likely be 4x per week
Tank gets NO food over weekends.

Zero algae except recent emergence of green hair coming from inside of Tunze circ pumps only. Would there be algae everywhere without our massive cleanup crew of snails, crabs, starfish, urchins, cukes? They always seem so very hungry.
Do most people feed multiple times per day? I guess I could arrange that Mon-Fri.
Maybe we should get auto feeder for weekends/holidays.
Tests are showing phosphates in big tank. Don't have accurate # on hand. Feeding too much or just because there is food going in? May look into setting up Phosban reactor but I first need to decide if I should change feeding habits.
What is very funny is last year I was seriously looking into ZeoVit and low nutrient systems and I have set up exactly the opposite.
 
My usual regimen is:

Auto feeder on lowest dose size setting 2x/day spectrum pellets.
Every other week a cube of misc frozen plus a teaspoon of flying fish roe daily. During my workweek I don't usually feed unless a specific coral is ailing.

Unless I'm out of town. Then it's just the auto feeder.
 
I feed once a day in the evening when I get home from work. I rotate through half a cube of PE Mysis, or Half a cube of cyclopeeze, or a small chunk of rods food. Occasionally I will toss in some fauna marin soft spirulina or marine base energy, but not too often since my cardinals refuse to touch it.

Twice a week I add in 5ml of acropower for the coral. Maybe once a week, or once every two week I spot feed all my coral with reef roids. I'm kinda conservative with that since it's really easy to over dose.
 
Also remember some fish need to be fed more often.

I hear Anthias that swim around often should be fed twice a day.

I have two clowns, a baby blue tang, and a leopard wrasse. The wrasse picks at pods all day.

Honestly I feed one every 2 days or so. Usually pellets, sometimes mysis and brine shrimp. My fish are doing well. Nice color, behavior, got some fat on them. When I do feed them mysis,brine, rods food (euphasia sp.), I make sure they're bloated.
 
We have an eheim autofeeder, seems like the best bang for the buck. I feed Omega One micro-pellets, about half a serving (spoonful) at 8am and at 5pm from the autofeeder. It was a challenge to get the feeding size small enough - the smallest aperture on the feeder was about 5x too much food, so I put tape over 80% of it.

I usually feed some frozen SF bay spirulina brine shrimp and argent cyclopeeze in the evenings (~ 7pm). I thaw a cube of each in a little squeeze bottle with water, so I can squeeze small amounts in. One cube usually lasts a day or two.

We dose live phytoplankton and amino acids once or twice a week. I target feed the corals once or twice a month.

Our clowns and flame angel will eat pellets. The mandarins and the cardinal forage for pods and eat frozen food. We designed the tank around the goal of keeping one mandarin fed, but have been ambitious enough to pair two of them. They both eat well and have been spawning for the last 2-3 months, which is a good sign of nutrition. Now, if only our BTA would host our clownfish!

Some folks might think we feed a lot, but our Phosphates are usually between 0.03-0.06ppm. However, we do have a lot of nutrient export (big skimmer, GFO, carbon, big refugium, water changes).
 
2-3 cubes hikari mysis once or twice per day. Eheim auto feeder (with floating feeding ring to keep food out of overflow)four times per day w spectrum pellets. Have 6 tangs and 6 anthias that I like to keep well fed
 
I find that my tangs (and foxface) are doing a poorer job at keeping the algae down when I feed more often, which unfortunately due to a couple of anthias I have is a requirement, so when thinking about fish, just say no to anthias :D
 
Oh I like them too, since they tend to be that pretty small fish so you aren't forced to go the damsel or chromis route. Just dislike having to feed them all the time.
 
sfsu - Could you elaborate a bit on anthias vs. chromis? I love anthias but thought they would be too big in a 105g that I don't want to stock too, too heavily with fish. I really want students to see a group of fish, not only singles. I have seen chromis hang out together around corals and thought they would be happier together and stay smaller. Any thoughts?
 
Sometimes the chromis work out and hang in a group, way more often they pick on each other and widdle down a group to one or two. I think lyre tail anthias in a 105 is fine. Have enough rocks for hiding places.
 
Yikes - thanks for the chromis info. I thought they were totally mellow and content. While educational and timely for middle schoolers, we do not need a marine lesson in bullying. I think we actually have too much rock, so anthias could be happy.
 
Yeah to follow up on what Mike said, fish group for basically 2 reasons, 1) harems, i.e. a male looking after his women (a form of protecting his territory), and 2) defense, lots of small fish bunched together to look bigger and the idea is any predator can't focus on any one fish so the odds are in favor of any one fish surviving.

For #1 we don't see it too much in a tank, since often there's nothing a male needs to protect his women from, and #2 you see in the LFS when they put a whole bunch of tiny chromis in a tank, and when you first put them in your tank because they're unsure, but as the grow, and more importantly, as they see there are no threats they will quickly not hang out around each other. So overall, some behavior that is often seen in the wild is not often continued in the home aquarium. Now if you had a somewhat aggressive tank, then you might see the shoaling of chromis, but then there's a whole other issue to worry about there :D
 
I like Chromis. The key : Maintain 5+
I read that a long time ago, tried it, and it seems to be true. As a larger shoal, they seem happy.
But as a tiny group, they pick on each other.

For my 240G heavily stocked feeding:
I have the eheim dual-feeder spitting out a little bit of flakes each side 2X per day. (So 4X total)
I have a eheim single feeder spitting out one dump of small pellets, 1X per day.
I feed 3 cubes in the evening. Mysis + Emerald Entree + Marine Cusine.
I randomly put in seaweed, and occasionally feed corals directly.
Very happy fish.
Minimal Algae. (Tangs + algae scrubber deal with that)
But quite a bit of Cyano.
 
In my experience, I have never been able to train my anthias to eat pellets or flakes before they all decided to die; not due to the lack of food, but for other reasons.

Feeding them what they wanted to eat resulted in algae blooms.
 
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