mbunas and feeders

on occasion its fine, like once a month two. mbunas can get dropsy from a high protien diet but if you only give it to them every once and a while they are able to digest it slowly. really the only thing it does is make the mbuna more aggressive. your friend would be better off feeding them brine shrimp on occasion, or getting a flowerhorn if he like to see fish being eaten.

I agree with the above post, but a major point that was not mentioned. Most feeder fish are not kept in the best of condtions and disease breeds like crazy in those overstocked conditons. These fish arent ment to last long so they are not kept well. Now do you want to introduce a possibly diseased fish in to your tank that you love and care for and try your best to keep your pets healthy? Personally i work too hard to keep one very good looking tank to introduce a disease for a miniute or two of entertainment. A very good way around this is to get a 10-20 gal tank and get a pair of convicts and plenty of rockwork and they will breed like crazy. Grow the fry and you will have disease free (depending on your care) feeder fish that are more nutritionally complete than most feeder fish. This is the safest best way and if you wanted to feed live foods other than live brine which is easy to hatch, this is what i would recommend.

Too much protein in a mbuna's diet can also cause bloat. If your fish's belly swells up and it is lethargic for a few hours or even a day, it may have bloat. Bloat can be serious and even deadly, but for the most part it should go away in a few hours. I, personally, wouldn't feed my mbunas feeder fish at all, but everyone keeps their fish differently.

Next, I agree that feeder fish that you buy from the lfs aren't the best way to go here.

However, I think you would be better off breeding guppies for feeder fish than convicts. Convicts, in true cichlid fashion, will breed like crazy and soon you will have a ton of fish that are too big to feed to your mbunas. Also cichlids are a bit more bony than other fish used more traditionally as feeders so some fish will refuse them. Guppies' adult length is a lot smaller than convicts, they are more soft bodied than convicts are, and they'll breed like crazy for you, too. I think you'd have better luck with them.

i give my flowerhorn store bought guppies about 2wice a month. well untill my convict fry are big enough to eat. but i dont like feeding my fish anything that has a high potential of carrying disease. frozen krill works well also!!!

Let me put it this way.

I have a friend that keeps a lot of big fish that you typically think of as ones that would eat feeders. Before we heard about the feeders passing on disease, she lost 2 full grown oscars and a 16" male jaguar to diseases that they caught from feeders. She only fed feeders once a month as a treat.

It is completely up to you. I wouldn't risk it, myself.

I imagine that if you were to collect them from the wild you'd have to watch out for pesticides, but otherwise I don't see why you couldn't feed them. I personally haven't heard of fish catching diseases from crickets or earthworms.

Has anyone else out there heard about fish catching diseases from crickets or earthworms?