Re: beefheart

["Newman, L" <Lee_Newman@bc.sympatico.ca>]

Andrew Ivanyuk wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> So, today I tried to give my fish a little bit of boiled  pig liver at
> first time. They accepted it readily, but... contamination of the water was
> awful! The liver made a cloud of clayish color.. So I did not dare to keep
> on  this experiment and gave my fish usual portion of shrimp
> Do all such kinds of food pollute water so hard? What is about giving it
> raw?
> 
> - Andrey

Hi All,
Feeding mammalian food items (beafheart for example) is not a sensible
practise for two very good reasons; it's hard on the water quality, as
noted above and; mammals store excess protein as "hard" fat, that can be
metabolized at a later time (during periods of fasting) whereas fish
store it as "oil". Fish store oils due to the low "melting" temperature
needed to use it at the comparatively low body temperatures fish enjoy.
Fish can not use mammal fat and therefore it tends to accumulate in the
liver, kidney and depending on the species, pyloric cecae (a part of the
digestive tract). Rams and corys are probably not long-lived enough for
fatty degeneration of the liver (the most common problem that arises
from feeding mammal fat to fish) to occur, but it's possible - you would
need to do a full necropsy to find out.

With the current level of knowledge (limited, I do realize) of the
feeding habits of our aquarium fish in the wild, there are many
substitutes that don't put the health of the fish second to the ease or
cost of feeding.

Thanks to Tom Wojtech, I have re-started to feed a lot of frozen brine
shrimp and the fish look great for it. Shrimp and their larvae probably
provide a significant food source in the wild. On three trips to the
Amazon, we found them everywhere!

Murex makes an enriched frozen brine shrimp that contains high levels of
the particular highly unsaturated fatty acids that fish need (fish need
certain HUFA's in order to make others), also, there are now frozen
Mysis relicta (a freshwater opposum shrimp) that are great to feed dwarf
cichlids (they are a little big, but Apistos are tough!). 

While frozen fish foods may cost a little more they better reflect what
the fish feed on in the wild. It's not too often a group of dwarf
cichlids get to tear a cow's heart out, swim off with it, and devour it.

Hope this helps.

Lee Newman
Curator of Tropical Waters
Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Centre


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