What is the best fish food for your pets or for your tropical saltwater fish displays? Everyone has a different opinion on this one. But some have chosen their fish food simply because of what the pet store tells them. That really limits you and your fish. If you’re looking to raise big, healthy, creative, and unusually happy fish, then you need to go a step above what the fish guy tells you.

First, you decide the purpose of your fish, the reason you bought them or obtained them in other ways and then after finding out their purpose, you can figure out the right food for them. Do you want small and regular fish swimming in the tank, ordinary fish? Or do you want to reward fish, fish that look a little bigger, fish that are a little happier? Do you want to see your fish run to the top of the tank to get their old dry food or do you want them to eat more like they do in the wild, hunting for their own food and getting the exercise this hunting gives them?

If you want the most natural diet, then you would choose live food. The next step up below would be frozen food that was once alive and last but not least is dry food or flake food that comes in those round cylinders.

Here are things to consider when buying fish food:

1. Do your fish feed on the bottom or on the top? Bottom feeders can enjoy food that falls to the bottom or floats, either way. Purchase some live Tubifex worms. The guy at the pet store will have them in the fridge. They look like a messy reddish-brown ball of tiny threadworms. They smell horrible, but I gather that the fish love this. If you drop a small ball in the tank, your fish will rush to catch them immediately.

2. If you have saltwater fish or tropical fish, you may want to try live brine shrimp as your meals. Of course, you can also supplement any fishmeal with dry or flake food.

You can buy name brand feed or no-frills feed and your fish will survive just as well. So how do I know this? One time I was raising some feeder fish and ran out of fish food. So I crushed some Cheerios between my fingers and fed the fish that food. They loved it, they thrived on it, so I never went back to regular fish food again. These fish became large, from tiny little fish that they fed. So my Cheerios were successful. Please do not try anything I write as this was my own experience and I cannot guarantee that it will work for you or your particular type of fish. IF you were to experiment with this, you could start by using your regular fish food and supplement it with Cheerios. That’s just a thought, not a suggestion or instruction. Good luck!

If you have a fish that has a good chance of growing and you want a big fish, you can start feeding it tubifex and move to real earthworms as the fish grows. You can have an astronaut oscellatus in your tank, which you bought when it was about a half inch long, and by feeding and raising this fish properly, you can make this same fish a foot or two in size. Incredible growth for an incredible fish. We had one just like this and we fed it huge earthworms. The original fish cost us less than two dollars and grew to be a monster.

Remember that when you buy a fish, sometimes you will pay next to nothing for the fish itself. It is feeding, housing, water filtration, and the decorative aspects of displaying the fish and tank that drive the real cost of the fish keeping hobby. I hope this article has helped you. Please read my other articles to be posted in the near future on fish food, fish feeding, guppy breeding and more specific articles on specific fish and fish related hobbies. The author has raised fish in the past and has had experience raising and caring for many different types of animals over the years of her life. Any and all questions, comments and comments are greatly appreciated.

I write from the heart on many topics, and the experience I write about is life. If you read any articles about pets here on my website, most of the times I have owned such pets, raised them, or cared for them for other people.