snail food and copper sulfate

[authmal]

I was planning on making some snail food this weekend. The ingredient list was going to be pumpkin pie filling, some flake food, some algae wafers, some eggshells (boiled, cleaned), and some vegetable cuttings from breakfast (bell peppers, onion, maybe some zucchini), and cricket feed. Blend until smooth, tap out air bubbles, and freeze for storage, or maybe bake in the oven for a bit then freeze for storage. Any other suggestions on that?

That cricket feed has copper sulfate as the penultimate ingredient. There are is a *lot* of conflicting information on whether copper sulfate is safe for invertebrates. On the one hand, it's in a lot of medicines. On the other, it's in a lot of foods, even shrimp/crab specific foods. Since it seems shrimp use copper in their blood akin to our usage of iron, I would imagine it's a question of concentration more than flat out presence of copper sulfate. Would it be safe to use cricket feed to bulk out the nutritional value of the snail food? :help:

Oh, if it matters, the cricket feed I was looking at was Fluker's.

 

[msjinkzd]

why do you want to use cricket food? What is its beneficial nutritional value?

Its very easy to make snail food using a jar of baby food (vegetable or fruit) or pureed veggies, a packet of gelatin and then add fish food, if you want, or further calcium supplementation (egg shells work, or some reptile powder, or pure calcium tablets from the drugstore that can be crushed).

 

[authmal]

It seemed that it had a pretty high calcium content, and I recalled something from one of your posts. I apparently my recall was faulty, because now that I see the words "reptile powder" I'm pretty sure that's what I was thinking of.

 

[msjinkzd]

ahhh, ok I don't know what cricket food consists of to give better advice. The recipes are in the stick at the top of the invert forum. Please don't hesitate to ask fi you ahve any other questions!

 

[authmal]

If I replace the cricket feed with the Jurassical reptile powder (are there good alternatives if I can't find that in particular?), does the rest of the recipe seem like a good idea? I'm targeting my bristlenose pleco, snails and shrimp with this, so I may just put small dabs on cookie sheets and freeze, or possibly bake them down a few minutes and freeze before feeding. The idea is that small discs would make it easy to increase feeding quantity if/as needed.

What's your take on how safe copper sulfate is in food for invertebrates?

 

[msjinkzd]

Yea for the most part. Keep in mind, most "algae wafers" have the primary ingredient as fish meal. They will eat it for sure, as most of what you are targeting are omnivores. With the gelatin recipe, its very easy to spread it quite thin on a cookie sheet then cut it into small portions. I wouldn't bake it and use boiling water with the gelatin as each heating process removes nutrients.

Other alternatives to the jurassical powder are calcium pills from the drug store, egg shells, tums. I don't like the tums as they tend to cloud the water.

As for the copper sulfate, I don't think it causes issues initially at all. I am not sure if its the only food for a duration if there may be cumulative problems in freshwater invertebrates.

I prefer kiln dried or extruded foods over ones containing preservatives. I use kens veggie sticks, xtreme catfish scrapers, mazuri gel foods, and homemade foods because of this.

 

[The Zigman]

Ken's also offers Veggie sticks with calcuim, which I feed to my shrimp.

 

[authmal]

If anyone is interested, my experiment is complete, and I'm dissatisfied with the results. I blended together egg shells, some algae wafers, some shrimp sticks, mushrooms, bell peppers, flake food, freeze dried bloodworms and baby food. I simply froze half in this awesome little ice cube tray (itty bitty pyramids) my wife found and baked some of the mixture. The frozen pyramids are easy to handle, sink pretty easily (the longest trip down took about 15 seconds) but disintegrate pretty easily in the water. The baked chunks (harder to scrape off the non stick cookie sheet than I anticipated) hold up in the water much better, but I netted less of it after the baking process than I expected. The good news is that in both instances, my shrimp and BN *love* the stuff. One of my von rios even figured out that if it swam close to the pyramid, it'd disintegrate a bit faster, and then chase down the chunks. I think next time, I will bow to the superior knowledge and experience of MsJinkzd, and use the unflavored gelatin. That said, I don't regret the experiment. It just didn't work out as well as I'd hoped.