We feed our fish ALL of the best fish foods

As many new foods that come along in the marine aquarium hobby, many of them touting to be “The Best”, it’s hard to know which food you should feed your fish. In all reality, many of the top fish food brands all have some unique attributes that they excel at – slow sinking, appetite stimulant, great color enhancers, probiotics etc.

Here at Reef Builders we have long since given up trying to identify the best fish food for our fish, and instead we’ve just decided to let them all get equal treatment. Many of the top brands of prepared fish foods are all lumped together, in one of three categories which has most to do with size and texture than anything else.

All of the flake foods are collected into one nice large bucket which makes it easy to see what flakes we are reaching for, with our pinching fingers or with long tweezers. The flake food bucket includes Seachem, New Era, Cobalt Aquatics, Sera and a smattering of others. The Seachem for the unique concentration of Chlorella, the New Era is in there for its high nutritional profile, the Cobalt Aquatics is in there for the blue pigments and the Sera Vipan is in there because we’re old school that’s why.

The first jar of pellets is reserved for the sub-millimeter pellet sizes – this jar includes three different Omega Sea MicroPellets, the three formulas of Nyos fish food, Sera MarinMix, Otohime, AquaThrive and probably one or two others.

The larger jar of food is where the real diverse mix of fish food is to be found, all in 1mm or larger sizes. This jar includes the three formulas of Nyos fish food in the larger size, Julian Sprung’s Sea Veggies, Sustainable Aquatics Hatchery Diet, Otohime in a couple sizes, New Life Spectrum and once again a couple more brands that escape us at the moment.

The only pelleted food that is omitted from the smorgasbord is New Era pellets since these are made in such a way that preserves a certain amount of moisture which would be stripped by the other foods if they were combined. We feel that combining all the foods and feeding them as a mix not only gives our fish the best nutrition from a range of different brands, but it also allows different species to pick out the foods they prefer from the rain of highly diversified prepared fish foods.

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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.