It’s been more than five years since we first learned of CSPro Flakes from AquaLife but only recently have we come to fall in love with this unique flake food. We’d have the same reaction as you reading this if someone said their fish food was unique, especially a flake food but hear us out because it was just as surprising to us.
We first really learned of the importance of astaxanthin pigments in fish nutrition in the 1990s when CyclopEeze was first coming to market and being used to make all kinds of color-enhancing foods, especially the numerous ‘red bits’ that are designed for feeding freshwater discus fish. Over the last decade CyclopEeze became entirely unavailable and has since been more or less replaced with Calanus which is also a pigment rich copepod.
Curiously, Calanus is available in a wide range of forms in the aquarium hobby today from frozen to freeze dried offerings but we’e only found it in flake foods offered in the UK and Europe, but not the U.S. Astaxanthin itself is used as a supplement in a wide range of foods, but for some reason it’s usually only pellets and frozen foods that get this special treatment.
But it’s not just the color-enhancing properties that drew us to CSPro flake foods, they are also just a damn good, hearty type of flake. Now that we have over a hundred fish to feed at the Reef Builders Studio we’ve burned through buckets of pretty much every flake food available on the market, but the trouble with them is that there’s so much crumbs at the bottom of a jar – this dusty leftover might feed some coral mouths but it’s really taking away from what we need the flake to do, and that is feed our fish.
We were pleasantly surprised to discover that the heartier flakes of AquaLife CSPro don’t break down into dust at the bottom of a jar, and we were stunned to discover that part of the reason is because AquaLife packs their jars by hand specifically to avoid this problem. We know we are probably in the minority when it comes to our preference for feeding flakes to marine fish with only occasional supplementation of frozen food. However we feel strongly that a quality flake food delivers great nutrition, stays in suspension in the water, stimulates picky fish by easily moving with the current of the aquarium without hitting your aquarium water quality like a nutrient bomb.
AquaLife makes their CSPro Flake with all the good stuff you’d expect in a modern fish food formula including Spirulina algae, probiotics, Omega-3s and vitamins and they are available in pelletized sticks for the larger fish as well. Reefers want to give their fish the ‘best’ possible nutrition, especially considering what we’re paying for them these days but you wouldn’t give your kids steak and seafood for every meal. Aquarists need a more ‘staple food’ for day to day feeding and with a dozen displays at the Studio, CSPro is increasingly looking like the best option in terms of both nutrition and value, without a bunch of useless dust when we get to the bottom of a jar.
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