Feeding yo' Reef!

[Anonymous]

Nutrition? How important is it to our captive aquatic pets?


Bigtime! Numero uno! The MOST important thing we can provide for our pets!

OK, second to oxygen..... OK, maybe third compared to lethal CO2 levels...maybe just after non toxic ammonia?

In my opinion, I need to consider nutrition as a top priority in my tanks, but it seems to get little air time on public forums. Why? In humans, lack of certain nutrients causes scurvy, deadly hypokalemia and decreased immune function. We all know how important certain nutrients are to our children, and we spend billions on Flintstone vitamins, but when it comes to our reef tanks, we think little of food and essential elements. Do fish and aquatic lifeforms have certain needs, too?

 

[Mthompson]

Certainly, some species have pretty well established nutrient requirements (salmon, channel catfish, other economically important foodfish). Other species have never been looked at. I am finishing up a class titled 'Aquatic Animal Nutrition", and the past three months we have only looked at what each nutrient group is, there broad functions, and maybe an example of a species requirement.

SHW, you sure have a knack for asking questions that would take months of conversation and reading/studying to answer. Marine species are more complicated nutritionally than freshwater species, so fully understanding the nutrient requirements of marine ornamentals is a long way off. Plus you would have to spend millions of $$$, or convince a research facility (university) to write/get grants and do the feeding trials, and the government grant system is a drawn out process itself....It has been ~50 years since nutrition work began on salmonids (arguably the most economically important aquaculture fishes worldwide) and we still are doing feeding trials on them!

So, yes there are definitely nutrient requirements for aquatic organisms (and all others, even trees), but pinpointing them is a different matter.

Just as a side note - If anyone wants to fund the research, I would do the work, along with many others on here I suppose...

 

[saltank]

Have you read Eric Borneman's "Aquarium Corals" he emphasizes nutrition in the form of feedings/suspended particles in the water column

IME I've had corals not grow until/unless I fed them directly; a ricordea polyp for one, have had it for over a year, essentially no growth; started feeding it plankton a few weeks ago it has never looked better; better color and getting bigger

Torch and frogspawns took off like crazy after I started direct feeding them plankton and mysis

Now if I could only get my oversized orange monti to maintain its bright orange color, ugh.....

 

[sihaya]

Actually, I think this is discussed quite a bit on forums and in any decent marine aquarium book. It's also discussed quite a bit on websites like this one (Advanced Aquarist), RK, WWM, etc.

But anyway... what's with the pic?

 

[Anonymous]

I think it's a shot of her juvie seahorses.

 

[loosecannon]

Discover December issue; The census of marine life. What lives in the ocean? In 2000, this deceptively simple question spawned a $650 million study to catalog ALL sea life:plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi. We simply had no concept of the diversity of life in the ocean, says rutgers University biologist Fred Grassle, who chairs the Census of Marine life`s scientific steering committee. Whether it was coral reefs, the deep seafloor, or even what lives in people`s backyards along the shore-so little was known. {www. iobis.org}For more info. My point is that it`s hard to know what to feed are tanks , when we don`t know whats in the water?