Many of you know that I have been battling ongoing floatiness/constipation/sbd problems for awhile. I have tried everything (soaking the food, fasting, peas, epsom salt, medigold, metromeds, etc) and am now down to just feeding very sparingly. My question is what is too little in terms of feeding? I am now only feeding 1x/day and give each fish only 1/2 of a soaked progold pellet, 1/2 of a pea or 1 soaked spirulina pellet (only one thing per day on different days). Is this too little food? I feel so cruel ).

Thanks, sea

lol,poor Goldfishs.Ur Goldfish need nutrition.. Hopefully winter can come soon. If the temp is below 50F,then you can feed ur fish once every 3 days. ^.<

Sea that isn't enough, basically you would be starving the fish.

If you can't treat the SBD fish, keeping it under control then you are faced with euthanizing that fish. Harsh measures yes, but the alternative is death by starving. Not fair to the fish.
Starving isn't a pretty sight and leaves an animal desperate, I am sure you wouldn't want the fish to suffer. So your proposal really isn't the way to go.

And while every couple days feeding sounds good on paper, it isn't a healthy way to go either.
Just sit and imagine how hungry you would get only eating once every 3 days. That too isn't fair.

Hi Laurie,

Actually I didn't say once every 3 days (that was the person who replied to my original post) What I am doing is feeding once every day but sparingly, i.e. giving each fish only 1/2 of a soaked progold pellet, 1/2 of a pea or 1 soaked spirulina pellet (only one thing per day on different days). Is this ok?

By the way I hope your fish is recovering.

--sea

Here is something to try. It has worked for me with a floaty ryukin. Soak until mushy Wardley's shrimp pellets. I feed my ryukin about 5-6 of these at a time. My fish floats with any other type of food, but can tolerate the shrimp pellets. It can't hurt to give it a try.

Also, you can try some lightly cooked zucchini. Just the soft centre part. It seems to be easily tolerated, too.

I was having ongoing sbd problems with some ranchus and one simple thing solved their problem. I stopped feeding them progold. Now, I hate to say this because I think it's an extremely high quality product, but perhaps for some fish, it's not ideal. However, I have been feeding it to my Bristols, wakins and tamasabas, and I think their intestines do very very well on the progold, and I'm thrilled with the results.

What I did to get rid of the sbd was frozen daphnia as main food for several days
then add in:
HBH super-soft spirulina (check ebay stores!!!) and frozen bloodworms
now they eat:
frozen brineshrimp and bloodworms, HBH super-soft spirulina and Hikari Saki Kingyo.

Sea- I was experiencing your same situation: trying to solve the swb by decreasing the ammount of food, and they would still float!!! What a pain! As soon as I got them switched to a whole different concept of feeding, they grew some immediatly, their oranges turned to reds and I've never seen them float wierd since.

Good Luck!

One good word for fish with floats......GEL FOOD

Wow, thank you all for your thoughtful responses - I appreciate it and am newly encouraged

Touchofsky - it is great to see you around again - it has been awhile and I was worried about you - you helped me so much back when Nugget was sick (he's fine now except for this newfound floatiness). I'll be happy to try the soaked shrimp pellets and zucchini. I am happy to try anything

GlassGoldfish - you know there were several times that I thought it could be the Progold (even though I started soaking it) but kept dismissing that idea since it has such a good reputation. You see I made so many changes to my tank and fish care regimen at once several months back. One of the changes I made was changing from OSI Spirulina Aquarium flake food and OSI Goldfish flake food to Progold. Nugget never had constipation/SBD disease on these flake foods but I wanted to go with the best so I made the switch to Progold. Then I got a new fish and had to deal with a bacterial infection, parasites, etc. I think that is all over with but now my fish are both floaty. I kept thinking they were still sick from something or it was due to some other change I made (switching to Prime and adding too much?) but it could very well be the Progold since I made that change at the same time.

I am going to try to switch from Progold to the other foods mentioned - I might even try making my own gel food.

One thing though - if Progold makes them floaty would you expect that medigold, metromed or jumpstart would also cause floatiness? I have used these before but don't remember things being this bad (although I can just be much more observant now that I read this site )

Thanks again, sea