Commercial Food & Nutrition Myths
So you have an aquarium, but finding the scoop on your aquatic companions’ needs is a jumble of contradictory information, myths and guesswork. We cut through the confusion to provide straightforward facts about aquarium nutrition.
Introduction
Since the dawn of the aquarium-keeping hobby, enthusiasts have struggled to provide our companions with optimum conditions. The two pillars of a healthy aquarium are, of course, water quality and nutrition. Meeting the nutritional needs of the wide variety of fish kept in captivity has been one of the biggest challenges over the past century of keeping fish.
Fish are a highly diverse group, and meeting each species’ nutritional needs is difficult. Particularly when you consider that a single tank can contain a range of herbivores, carnivores and omnivores. Add in aquarium corals and invertebrates, and the challenge can be daunting. A common misconception peddled by “experts” is that no single food can meet all your aquarium dweller’s nutritional needs, with food-rotations between products and various frozen foods as the best way to cover the ‘gaps’ in your fish’s diet.
Here’s the reality: cycling from one nutritionally deficient product to another doesn’t solve the problem. It’s better to stay with one product, if that product contains the complete nutrition profile needed to fill your aquarium companions’ dietary needs. Ideally, the food you choose combines nutrients from a variety of aquatic plant and marine animal sources (along with vitamins, minerals and trace elements) into a single diet.
By way of contrast, let’s look at the last 25 years in the dog food industry. An explosion of premium dry kibble varieties have hit the market and been embraced by dog owners worldwide. Some are marketed as holistic diets, and even tout grain-free formulas containing beneficial herbs and botanicals. Higher quality formulas offer complete and balanced nutrition, and most dog owners will feed their pets this diet for the entire life of their companion. Dogs today are healthier and longer-lived than ever. Much of this can be credited to a vastly improved diet.
Yet ask this same dog owner what they feed their fish, most will hold up several brands of tropical fish food and frozen food supplements tucked away in the freezer.
COMMERCIAL FOODS & NUTRITION MYTHS
Keeping fish healthy in the artificial environment of an aquarium is becoming increasingly viable and convenient thanks to advances in aquarium-keeping technology. While marine and reef tanks are still a challenge, it’s now possible to keep varieties of fish and coral that were virtually impossible a few short years ago.
Only recently have a trickle of products marketed based on holistic premium nutrition started to appear (of course, this is easier to claim than accomplish). However, today by far the largest-selling foods are lowest-common-denominator products that have barely advanced in 30+ years.
Aquarium nutrition is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the hobby. Myths and fallacies have become ‘common knowledge’ — and mistaken as fact — through repetition over the “grapevine”. When you consider that there are an estimated 60 million aquarium hobbyists worldwide, bad nutrition information leading to fish being “disposable” has a serious impact on hobbyists’ wallets, keeping people in the hobby, and pressure to harvest tropical pet fish.
Water quality (a favorite obsession of the aquarium-keeper) is very important — but often overlooked is that a healthy fish given proper nutrition is more resilient and can tolerate larger fluctuations in their environment. Thus, water quality and nutrition work hand-in-hand.
The nutrition supplied to your aquarium companions is the most important factor in keeping many species alive in captivity; yet enthusiasts will spend thousands of dollars on their fish, corals, aquarium and stands, filters, heaters, lighting systems, reef controllers and more. Yet when deciding their companions’ optimum diet, they either blithely follow the cues provided by armchair experts, or choose their food based on the images on the label. After all, a food with a picture of a Regal Blue Tang must be designed specifically for that species, right? Maybe — maybe not.
We’ll take a look at these questions and more in the next article “Are Most Fish Omnivorous?”
BIBLIOGRAPHY & RECOMMENDED READING
Vinogradov, A. P., 1953. The elementary chemical composition of marine organisms (Efron and Setlow, translators), Yale University Press, New Haven, 463-566.
Ako H., and Tamaru C.S. (1999) Are Feeds for food Fish Practical for Aquarium fish? Intl. Aqua Feeds 2, 30-36.