What are you feeding your mbuna fry?

[Mbuna Ron]

I was wondering what everyone is feeding their mbuna fry. I used to use brine shrimp artema and spirulina for herbavore fry. Now I am using new life spectrum growth, spirulina and occasionally artema (frozen). I spoke to Albert about Cyclopeze (sp). So...any advice? BTW do you know where I can order a can of shrimp napuli rather than the small viles available at LFS?

[Vallisneria]

I feed freeze dried cyclops when they are very young and NLS grow when older. I feed a couple times a day and they grow pretty quickly.

[African_Fever]

Honestly, I wouldn't waste my time with raising BBS. Too much work. I use the freeze dried cyclop-eeze (I ordered from Jehmco) and then the NLS growth as soon as they can eat it. Ends up being usually 1-2 feedings a day with cyclop-eeze and then 4+ with the NLS pellets. The more frequently you do water changes, the faster your fish will grow.

This is a pic of my two week old F1 yellow labs on the above feeding schedule. I don't think you'll get better results with anything else.

http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b5da0...6108AbOHLVy5at1

[Mbuna Ron]

Wow. The size of your yellow labs are amazing after only 2 weeks. How long do you continue to use Cyclopeze? Why does frequency of water changes increase growth?? I change about 15% per week.

[RDFISHGUY]

Water changes make you r fish grow faster because they have les environmental stress , the trace elements in the water are replenished, gill function is better and pollutants are lower. Happy fish is a growing fish. NLS is CGS (certified good stuff)as for cyclopeze I don't know I can't get it in Red Deer I don't think the only place I've seen it is on Gold's website www.cichlids.ca.Hope that helps.

[African_Fever]

Fish release pheromones into the water that somewhat control their growth and the growth of the other fish in the tank. As these pheromones build up, the growth of the fish slows. Increasing the frequency of water changes allows you to grow more fish to a larger size in a smaller tank (keeps the pheromone concentrations as low as possible).

I've heard of experiments done with Discus, where one tank was a 20 with once daily 50% water changes and the other was a 10 with something like 4x daily 50% water changes (same number of fish). The fish in the ten grew much faster than those in the 20 (this is an extreme example but does prove the point).

I try to do ~40% at least every other day in my 10g fry tanks and about 30% in my other grow out tanks every 2 or 3 days (20's and 25's - it just gets to be too much work sometimes). I continue to feed the cyclop-eeze until the fish are at least 1", but it's down to once or twice daily with about 4-6 feedings of NLS growth formula. Due to the heavy feeding and large number of fish in each tank, I basically have to keep up with the water changes if I want the fish to grow at all.

Hope this helps!

[Mbuna Ron]

Thanks! This is great information. I am definately going to adjust the way I raise my fry. I just may need another tank ...have to think of a way to break it to my wife. The last 90 gallon I bought, I use the shock method..just bought it and brought it home.. :bang1: