Using cold extruded food to deliver targeted medicine to reef fish

One of our prized surgeonfish seems to be getting a little skinny for our liking despite being fed like a king and showing a nice fat belly. The most likely cause of this weight loss is internal parasites, the likes of which require specific treatment.

After conferring with the Fish Wrangler, he prescribed using General Cure which contains both Metronidazole and Praziquantel in food to target feed the skinny tang. Rather than remove the Acanthurus from his nice surge-y home, we are opting to spike his food with General Cure but instead of going the frozen food route, we are trying something new.

We are big fans of cold extruded fish food by New Era Aquaculture, not only for its nutritional quality but also its physical versatility. We’ve written before about pressing cold extruded pellets into a larger one to target feed an eel in a fish display tank. In this case we are actually crumbling up the extruded pellets, adding the medicine powder and then re-forming the meal of food and medicine into the same sized pellets.

A single pouch of General Cure was mixed with approximately half an ounce of crumbled New Era Aquaculture Marine Pellets. We may have added a little much of the medicine as the surgeonfish was eating the doped pellets a little more cautiously than his usual gluttonous self, but he is eating them.

Time will tell whether this approach to enhancing cold extruded pellets will work for this particular grazing fish, but it should be even easier to follow these guidelines for medicating foods of larger fish who eat their fish whole. If anyone else has tried medicating food in a similar please do chime in with your thoughts/experiences and hopefully we’ll report back with pictures of a much fatter, healthier tang to show for our own efforts.

Cold extruded fish foods like New Era Aquaculture pellets are easy enough to crumble up into a soft “meal”

Here’s a closeup of what the crumbled up NEA pellets look like

A single pouch of General Cure is on the left while about half an ounce of New Era Aquaculture pellets are on the right

I poured about half the pouch of General Cure to the half ounce of NEA pellets

After mixing the General Cure and the crumbled up pellets a lot of the medicine powder fell to the bottom, hence the need to press, break up and repeat

A small mortar and pestle makes the job of re-pressing the food and medicine together much easier

The simple act of breaking up the pressed food & medicine mix creates crumbles which are appropriately bite sized “pellets” for fish

Working with the food caused it to dry out a bit, preventing it from sticking well, this might not be the case if you live in a more humid climate. For storage, a wetted ball of tissue was placed on top of a bottlecap so that the medicated food could regain some of its lost moisture while being stored in the fridge.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Jake Adams

Jake Adams has been an avid marine aquarist since the mid 90s and has worked in the retail side of the marine aquarium trade for more than ten years. He has a bachelor’s degree in Marine Science and has been the managing editor of ReefBuilders.com since 2008. Jake is interested in every facet of the marine aquarium hobby from the concepts to the technology, rare fish to exotic corals, and his interests are well documented through a very prolific career of speaking to reef clubs and marine aquarium events, and writing articles for aquarium publications across the globe. His primary interest is in corals which Jake pursues in the aquarium hobby as well as diving the coral reefs of the world.