Eat your veggies!

[Ellen]

Does anybody feed fresh vegetables? (Or fruits? I was reading about people feeding oranges on another site. That's new to me!) If you do, what kind do you feed them and how do you prepare it? Also, who are you feeding? Bottom feeders, cichlids, livebearers?

I'm about to feed zucchini to my snails for the first time, but I'm sure the little candy stripe pleco and angels will try it also!

Ellen

[geoff_tropheus]

Re: Eat your veggies!

I have feed fresh vegtables to my Tropheus and to other africans cichlids.

I have feed the following....

Spinach Leaves
Romaine Lettuce leaves
Seaweed Leaves
Zucchini Slices, Cuccumber Slices, Carrots slices, and Squash Slices.
Peas - Inever have, but others I Know blend it up and feed it as a paste sometimes

The Leaves I put on a veggie clip.  The slices I use a rubber band and attach to a rock or someting, If I dont have a rock to attach it wih, I nuke it for about 5 seconds, let it cool to room temp, then drop it in.  The carrots might not sink, but the others will onced microwaved.

Do not use regular lettuce.

The thing to remeber to allways wash it good, and try to get the organic stuff so that you dont have to worry about pesticides.  Another thing is fresh veggies can be messy.

I have seen people put Orange Slices in a tank, and the first thing that comes to my mind is what idiot thought that fish eat oranges?  What in the wild gives them a source of citrius and vitamin C?  I cannot think of a sinlge thing, I know they get vitamin C from the foods or fish they eat, but nothing like the Citrius Fruits.  I mean that is citric acid your putting in the tank.

Sounds like someting aint right dosent it?

[Ellen]

Re: Eat your veggies!

Thanks for getting this thing rolling geoff...

I have fed:
carrot slices - didn't really get a reaction, so I quit after a few tries
romaine lettuce - every fish I've ever had seem to like to nibble on this
peas' insides - ditto

I rinse it and just drop it in, raw, I've never really tried to feed the bottom feeders veggies so I've never worried if it floated. (They get algae wafers and shrimp pellets.) The peas are cooked frozen peas (leftovers) that I pinch, making the insides squeeze out.  Tonight I zip-tied the raw zucchini to a piece of terra cotta for snails. I never leave any fresh food pieces in the tank more than 3 or so hours.

I thought that the fruit would fall into the water, thats where they got it from? I know that I've read that some of the big ol' SA fishes will eat fruit that falls into the rivers, but I never thought about what kind of fruit it was. I know that oranges are acidic, but really how much acid does one slice contain? I was under the impression that it didn't really have that much.

Ellen

[geoff_tropheus]

Re: Eat your veggies!

How sweet is the orange to you when you take a bite?  Now imagine a small fish taking a bite? Hmm..I duno..

I would think that most likely a orange slice would have no impact on your micro-system, but the fish themselves eating a piece of orange?

I would do more reasearch on this before I put that in there.  You might want to ask people at Petsmart why they do it.  That is about the only place I have ever seen put the slices in there.

[PhishPhreek]

Re: Eat your veggies!

Unlike most of you guys, I do the cooking at my home and for years I have used the leftover 3 day old vegatables to culture infusoria.   trimmings from the ends of Squash to feed snails,  leatus & cabbage leaves cleaned from the heads to feed my vegatiarians.

Verry little of the raw vegie discards that are trimmed on my cutting board fail to find their way to my fish tanks or live food cultures.

[Ellen]

Re: Eat your veggies!

Oh no! I don't want to try it! I was just wondering if anybody else had tried it, chain stores not included.

I was trying something more along the lines of getting a good thread going about who feeds what fresh foods to what fishes, it could be helpful for newer fishkeepers who had never thought about what fresh foods to feed their fishes, or had been intimidated about putting something not "for fish" in their sterile :) aquarium.

I'll try looking for whatever it is I remember seeing about big fish + fruit in SA.

Ellen

[Ellen]

Re: Eat your veggies!

Citrus fruits, i.e. oranges, originated in tropical and subtropical southeast Asia. I don’t have any fish from that area, so I’m not even going to experiment with that one.

This isn’t the article I remember, but it says the same thing. I don’t really know what any of those fruit are, or what is closely related to them that we could get here, but its food for thought (and very interesting reading, IMO).
Do a Google search for "frugivorous fish amazon" and it'll be near the bottom of the results page, from the website earthscape.org, called So Fruitful a Fish.

Ellen

[Mzungu]

Re: Eat your veggies!

Ellen, the link in your last post requires a password, at least for me. Do I need to sign up to see the article? I'm interested in reading it!

[guppymax]

Re: Eat your veggies!

Soup anyone?

max

[Ellen]

Re: Eat your veggies!

Now thats weird. Do a google search for "frugivorous fish amazon" and it'll be the 8th website on the results page, called So Fruitful a Fish: Chapter 6.

Ellen

[Mzungu]

Re: Eat your veggies!

And there it is! Thanks!