:thumb:
there is a lot of vitamins and minerals for a better color and health on fish as they get it from the wild witch we do not have in our systems...best bet is mix your own food or find a good quality food.

maybe it's not clear... but all those foods I mentioned, Spirulina, krill, salmon skin... all have high levels of natural astaxanthin, so long as they are fresh & raw.

Actually I mix all you mentioned above and few other ingredients as some are fresh and some freeze dried to all my fish and a slight different recipe for my corals for few years now,some of the best coloration and health I seen :biggrin:

It was next to impossible to get a good picture of him with my fangled lights, but you can see how his face isn't jet black like some PBTs, the black on his tail is really washed out, and he's got practically no white framing his face. In fact it might not be that his face is any less black, it might just be the absence of bright white around it that makes it look that way.

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps3c9161f1.jpg

Say compared to this photo I stole off the internet, which is what all the PBTs I saw in Ocean Creation recently looked like. I'm also now just noticing that my guy's fins on the bottom part of his body are the same colours as the fins on the top, whereas in other PBTs they're snow white.

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psa0d19ab1.jpg

Are those things that can change, or even affected by diet?

ETA: you can see my very preggers daddy Bangai cardinal in the background of the first pic!

I don't have enough fish to justify making my own batches. Yet, I'm like many others, miss the Ocean Nutrition formulated gelatin foods. I wonder if there's any 'appetite' (get it? ha... ha... ) for LFS to make house blends for sale...

Miss Ocean Nutrition gelatine food? Did they stop selling it? I just picked some up a couple of weeks ago. Out of 21 fish, though, only 1 will eat it, my tang won't touch the stuff. I also picked up some of that reppashy stuff that allows you to make your own gel foods, but again, out of 21 fish, only 1 will eat it (but he eats everything, including plastic and sometimes coral).

I ran a whole broodstock operation with 500 tanks and over 100 species (clowns, gobies, dottybacks, blennies, angels, etc etc) using lots of formula one (and later, in-house blends). I even had anthias and lion fish trained on eating Formula 1. (Got them to spawn on it, but could not raise larvae).
http://www.oceannutrition.com/?page_id=58

it takes some time for the fish to get familiar with it. If given a choice, fish will take Artemia over everything else.

Where in Calgary did you find it? Ocean Nutrition ran into Canadian import issues for a while (as I believed).

I got it at Wai's, I seem to remember him having quote a bit of it. It couldn't have been more than 2 or 3 weeks ago, I got formula one but he also had the other kinds as well

cool. Thanks! I'll go pick some up.

I hope you can get your fish onto it. It's good stuff second only to making your own, b/c it is actually a mix of seafoods and not just artemia/mysis. There's some good blends with high HUFAs. It may require your starving your fish a little bit and offering nothing but this food to wean them onto it.

They used to offer it in a flat pack of extruded crumble. The photos look like frozen cubes. You may find it helpful to thaw it, and press it through a garlic press to extrude it into smaller crumbles, and use a spoon to break into bite size.

Hi,
From my experience importing fish there are several factors that affect a fishes colouration.
1. Sex
2. Dominance
3. Health
4. Size
5. Geographic region
6. Food

When it comes to food the best source for aquarium fish is a frozen marine one. When I wholesaled fish I used to feed the Pacifica Plankton. I found that the vast majority of fishes readily took to it. Even just after being unpacked from the bag. I jokingly call this food "Fish and Coral crack" because they do get addicted to it. When I feed the fishes in my coral tanks the corals all put out their feeding tentacles... like they are begging for it. For more info on the food you can check it on my website at:
http://www.oceanfreshaquarium.com/pacifica-plankton/

Cheers,
Tim