Fish Food

The fastest way to lose a new fish is to buy the food it should eat instead of the food it will eat. A wild-caught angel that has been on frozen mysis for three weeks does not convert to pellets because the label says complete nutrition. It converts because you soaked the pellets in mysis water for a week first.

New Life Spectrum is most of this shelf and it is what we put people on once a fish is already taking prepared food. Reef Nutrition covers the live and refrigerated end, the phyto and pod products that feed corals and filter feeders as much as fish. Seachem NutriDiet, Hikari, Vitalis and PE Mysis cover everything in between.

Three things decide whether a food works. Pellet size, because a fish that cannot fit it will not eat it. Sinking versus floating, because anything that feeds off the rock will never come to the surface for it. And whether the fish is eating at all: a fish still refusing food on day three is a quarantine problem, and no pellet fixes that.

Reef care guides: What to Feed Marine Fish · Spot Feeding Corals