For anyone who's never tried it - Freeze Dried Cyclopeeze
 

Okay, I've been using this stuff for just over two months now and here's my observations:

Fish that can see it go mad over it. I've not had a single fish (up until this one stupid purple tang) that refused it. I can't say much about color enhancement though, as most of my fish were pretty blindingly colorful to begin with.

Anyway, a big complaint I've seen all over the boards for the freeze dried stuff is that it has a tendency to float and get sucked in by overflows or stick to the glass at the surface of the water. My solution to this was to rehydrate small amounts of the Cyclopeeze in bottles filled with distilled water. 1 tspn to a small pop bottle worked out to about 2 days worth of feeding for my tanks and I've not had any problems with floating or fouling as long as it was kept in the fridge.

I find this product, using the above method, to be much more convenient to use then the frozen product (no more HUGE blocks of red chunks sitting in sandwich bags in your freezer + no more freezer burned Cyclopeeze = minuscular orgasm :biggrin: ) and more attractive to fish then the flake product.


5/5 - well worth the cost.




PS. Yeah... I think I'm going to review EVERY food item that I pick up from now on. Hope this is all helpful to anyone reading.

I like the FD cyclop-eeze and I agree with the floating problem.

I find it really makes corals open up for feeding especially my Sun Coral, it must be the scent of the Cyclop-eeze in the water.

I like the pre-hydration idea.

Actually I would like to rig up a system to have a container of water with the cyclop-eeze in it, and have some kind of continuous auto-feeder to slowly feed this into the tank.

Is there any nutritional advantage of frozen over freeze dried? You would think that frozen would be fresher/better... ?
If not, I will definitly switch over to the fd stuff. Where did you get it?

- Chad

I get mine from Gold Aquariums (I work there). I doubt there's much advantage to using the frozen item since a lot of it gets freezer burned and/or gets thawed out and refrozen (accidentally breaking off chunks that are too big). And if you believe all the claims, freeze dried technology has advanced to the state where preserved items maintain some 99.9999999% of their nutritional value.

The only thing about rehydration is that it take some 8 hours for the cyclops to fully absorb water and lose their boyancy. I'd keep that in mind when rigging up a continous drip system.

Well than that's where I'll get mine too :biggrin: . Thanks for the tip - I have had troubles with the same things you mentioned about frozen. And rehydration isn't a problem because even my frozen sits in a cup in the fridge for a couple days before I use it all. Thanks.

- Chad

Heres what I do with my FD... I take a pinch and put it under the water surface and squeeze it together as hard as I can. The majority won't float after that.

Problem with that is that it absorbs a lot of saltwater. Fish get their hydration from their foods. It takes a lot of energy to expell the salts from their bodies and every bit of freshwater coming in from the foods helps.

I know a lot of people soak their pellets in water for their fish for this very reason.

I just realized that fd gives you a good opportunity to add a vitamin supplement to your food as it rehydrates. I don't think frozen will absorb as much as it is probably already saturated.

- Chad

I did not know this thanks for the tip :)