Easy Cichlid Feeding Tips

Cichild feeding is not particularly difficult because they like a wide variety of foods. You can feed them live food, prepared food, or a combination. It may take a little convincing to get your cichlid to accept pellets or other prepared foods, but once they are accustomed to it they will gobble prepared foods up eagerly as well.

Cichilds enjoy hunting for their food, so live food is definitely something you should consider. However, there is a risk of disease or population contamination when introducing live food to the tank. This is why most pet stores and fish owners prefer to keep the diet primarily pellets. A treat of live food every once in a while is the best method, with pellets making up the bulk of the diet.

The benefits of using primarily prepared food for your Cichilds are many, ranging from ease of accessibility to making sure they are receiving all of the nutrition they need. You can use automatic feeders with pellets and it is much easier to instruct a sitter how to feed your fish if you aren't trying to show them how to handle live food.

Two notes about live foods. Many aquarists have noticed that their cichlids sometimes become sick and die after eating bloodworms. The reason for this is that the natural habitat of bloodworms contains substances that are toxic to cichlids and if those toxins have found their way into the bloodworm's body, it can harm your cichlid. Also, in their natural habitat, cichlids like to eat the algae off of rocks. You could let the algae grow on some rocks in your aquarium and the cichlids will probably eat it, which will bring you one step closer to a self-sustaining aquarium.

Because Cichlids are predators, they probably won't respond to pellets at first unless they were raised on them from the beginning. You may have to trick them for a while by using an eye dropper to move the pellet around and make it more interesting. Even then they may not take to the taste. Having other pellet eating fish in the same tank could help your Cichild to learn to eat its new food when it sees other fish gobbling it up.

Different species will learn at different rates, so be patient and consistent. Most Cichilds can go for up to a month without eating, so don't give in and let them have live food for fear of starving them. When they get hungry, they will eat nearly anything. Once you have them trained, cichlid feeding is really easy.

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