Write-Up Wednesday: Flaked Fish Food
The invention of flaked fish food made feeding your finned friends a heck of a lot easier. Since flaked food is dry and stored at room temperature, feeding your fish is as easy as opening a container of flaked fish food, grabbing a couple of pinches and feeding.
Flaked food is manufactured by mixing several ingredients with water to create a slurry. This slurry is then sprayed onto rollers where it is baked at a high temperature. Once baked, the sheet of flaked food is broken up into flakes and packaged.
Modern day flaked foods come in a variety of diets from carnivore focused to herbivore focused as well as a variety of flake sizes. While probiotic bacteria is an ingredient sometimes added to flaked food, keep in mind that the high temperature required to bake the food will kill the probiotics eliminating any potential benefits for your fish.
As with any fish food, I recommend you feed a variety. My feeding regiment includes a mix of flaked foods, pelleted foods, frozen food and nori (dried algae) sheets. I also feed my fish a mix of types of food. For example, when I feed flaked food, I rotate between jars of Marine Flakes, Algae Flakes and Aegis Flakes from New Era. The feeding rotation helps ensure the fish get the various nutrients they need and it helps them to make sure they actually eat! Remember some fish won’t eat certain types of food such as my White Tail Bristletooth Tang (Ctenochaetus flavicauda) who won’t touch flaked food. Variety is the spice of life, even for your fish.
Browse the Store! Questions?
Very interesting to know about flake food. I don’t use it with my fish but still good to know. I would like to know and see the variety of LRS Reef Frenzy food in the same way. Is this a possible all in one variety for most aquarium fish. Great article.
I actually mix 2-3 varieties of flakes and some freeze-dried brine shrimp and more together in one container – then when I use the flake flood, I grab whatever comes in a pinch and there is variety every time I feed the flakes. I do the same with the pellets, and even the frozen…
Have you found that the usage of flaked food raises the phosphate levels? Seems as if every time i feed it i get a small bloom of brown algae.
I feed my fish with flake food every day using an automatic fish feeder and a mixture of food types and my phosphates stay in check. In addition I feed a mixture of frozen foods, nori, and sometimes (rarely) even a grazing ring manually each day. It’s pretty funny that my fish know the schedule and start begging about 15 minutes before the pumps shut down for feeding time.
What is a foldger ? ,have never heard of that word before ,must be an american thing.
http://www.folgerscoffee.com/folgers-jingle/
The high quality flake foods like the New Era brands and Ocean Nutrition don’t break down as fast in the water column. Good Stuff. I like to mix my flake in a cup of water before pouring into the tank which allows the fish to feed without sucking in air and have the food go right into the overflow. Anyone else do this?
Hello, I am one of the Co-founders of Cobalt Aquatics and am in charge of Product Development and Marketing. I want to thank Mr. Salt Water Tank for doing an excellent job of trying to educate people on this great hobby or ours. But, I do take exception to the statement made in this post regarding probiotics in flake fish food. I doubt very seriously that you have done any research regarding this and know for a fact that Cobalt has never been contacted for comment or guidance about probiotics in our flake foods. And find it extremely disappointing that the statement on probiotics is presented as fact, when it is really just uninformed opinion. The real fact is our food has viable bacteria in concentrations of at least 1,000,000 CFU/g as indicated on our Guaranteed Analysis section that is mandated by AAFCO and enforced by state law to be verified by outside labs and is printed on every can.
Again, I thank Mr. Salt Water tank for all you have done and continue to do to help advance this hobby that we all love, and want to extend my deepest respect and admiration to you, but have a simple request and would appreciate the same level of respect in return, that statements that are made about technologies without any direct knowledge or data of the specific ingredients, or manufacturing processes be positioned as opinion and not fact in the future.
Thanks for the feedback Les. Feel free to post a link of the certified lab results so we can all examine it. I would be particularly interested to see some results from a couple of different certified labs that did not get food from cobalt directly.