Hogs with fins...

AbbeysDad

Okay, my 60g now has 2 red wag platys, 2 sunset mickey mouse platys, 2 black mollies and 9 neon tetras.
I'm currently feeding twice per day, but only what can be consumed in 5 minutes or so...
HOWEVER, whenever I feed, it's a free for all of what a casual observer would call starving fish!
Matter of fact, I tried rooting some floating plants (which did sprout roots), but the platys stripped and ate all the leaves off the plants!!!

One of the sunset platys just had a small brood of fry (well, I was able to rescue 911 about a dozen). I temporarily have them in a net breeder basket. The fish know there's food in there and swim around the basket like sharks!

I wonder...should I be feeding more? Can/will they eat too much? Are platys just pigs and I should not worry that they think they're always hungry?

Footnotes:
1) Those neons may be small, but when the dinner bell rings, there are streaks of greased lightning that strike the food!
2) Following the WWC, I've been treating the fish to thawed frozen brine shrimp. It no more than hits the water and it's gone.

redchigh

Fish tend to do that.


I add enough to where a tiny amount hits the bottom. The fish clean it up, but thats how I know.

sik80

fish always feed like they're starved and will eat, eat, eat. You'd be amazed how little they really need. I feed approximately 45 small fish a small pinch of flake/granules and 3 hikari sinking pellets once per day. 1 or 2 days per wk i'll give them one cube of frozen bloodworms and no other food and I usually have 1 day per week with no food at all. Less food = less nitrates

AbbeysDad

Just curious about frozen foods as I have frozen shrimp, bloodworms, and daphina - I've been pre-thawing first - do you just drop in frozen and let thaw in the tank?

sik80

I thaw them out in a little cup of tank water first. Then i chop them up into tiny bits with scissors , so there's more litle bits to go around and my greedy pristella tetras don't get them all! I put some on the substrate with a pipette so the corys get some too

Romad

Yup. Platys = pigs. I think they would eat to bursting if they could.

Mine hover at the top like little pac men when it's feeding time.

Skooter

I was at a LPS and he had little glass fish bowl no larger than a tennis ball at the bottom of the tank. It was set at about 30 deg angle and it was full of live blood worms. they could not get out but the pleco's, shrimps, small fish could get in . this in my mind was a way cool idea other than blood worms have 7 day shelf life till they get nasty.If i could commit to buying some on a weekly bases I'd do it. To bad I'm too lazy!!