Sorry if this should have been in the foods section. Feel free to move it if deemed nessicary.

I know that bbs are one of the best first foods avaliable. I plan to feed bbs whenever possible but there are days where I will not be able to get in 4-5 feedings during the day. I want to make a gel food for fry for those days that I will be gone most of the day. So can gel food be fed as a first food, or do I need to wait a week or two before introducing it? Also how large of a piece would you add per 10-20 fry?

Lastly, I have been debating about what all to put into it. I have frozen BBS and bloodworms, Pro Gold, and the salad supreme veggie wafers I can mix in. I know its best to be protein rich for the first couple of months for best growth, but would it detract from the nutritional value to the fry by adding some pro gold or a tiny bit of the veggie wafer too?

And lastly, remove any uneaten gel food after how many hours? I assume if I drop it in at bedtime then remove uneten portions in the morning. But if its dropped in during the day, 5 hours? 10?

Thanks for any suggestions.

First foods - of course the live BBshrimp 'cause they swim around and attract the appetites. You can drop some frozen cubes of BBshrimp onto the bottom of the tank. After about 3-4 days the fry seem to find them well. This will also get them used to looking on the bottom for food. Sifted adult food pellets (I sift them through a fine sieve and use the powder from that) that are wet so that they sink slowly in the water are good. Smashed and sifted/soaked flakes are good too.

I like to use Goldfish Connection's Seafood Flakes for slightly older fry. It is all fish- protien - and you can crumble it really small and soak it. A bit older fry do well with that. Crumbled spiriliana flakes are great.

I make gel food for my fry - I put in dark green algae flakes, spiriliana flakes, BBshrimp (frozen or freshly hatched) and crushed seafood flakes or pellet dust. This is dropped in the fry tank whenever I have to be gone for too long and they are going to need food. A 1/2 inch cube will feed about 25 fry for 4-5 hours. I have never removed the cubes - they eat them.

Fry generally do not eat at night. Mine sleep - so food added before lights out is left uneaten and becomes waste. Sometimes, I have to leave their lights on longer than I would normally want to, so the fry have time to eat.

As the fry get older, they can have all kinds of stuff in their gel food - and they do really well with the gel..... I use the "clean out the refrigerator" trick on the gel. If I am hatching out BBshrimp for other fry, I dump all that is left in the hatchery into the gel food. (I often hatch out more than I need for the youngest so I can dump the excess into gel food for the older).

Use the blender to make the gel inclusions really fine - sift the pellets and the flakes so they are powdered, and blend the veggies to a liquid. All will be good. The older the fry, the more they can bite off - Daphnia, and even Brine shrimp. IF you have krill or brine shrimp that are too large for their mouths, grind them up in the food mill and put them in the gel food.



Babies are fun to feed. They grow SOOOO quickly!

I forgot, I do have frozen krill as well. And both plain adult brine shrimp and spirinula enriched adult brineshrimp. But the bbs are so much easier to add to gel food because you don't have to smush them up.

I usually use a mortar and pestle for the dry and frozen foods. Espicially for the smaller batches. For larger quantities I will use either the blender or food processor to achieve the desired particle size.