Slow continuous feeding regimen for Reef Tank

[trilinearmipmap]

I read an article about a slow continous feeding regimen for fish corals and inverts.

http://www.colszoo.org/internal/drum...r/pdf/2004.pdf

The idea was, when you feed once a day, fish will gorge themselves, a lot of food will get wasted and break down into pollutants, and the fish won't digest the food well either as the transit time through their intestines is speeded up.

Feeding by a slow continuous method over a 24 hour period was supposed to result in more of the food being eaten and digested properly, less food becoming waste product to degrade water quality, and healthier fish and corals.

I don't know if this is a good idea to but I thought I might try it out and see what happens, maybe set up a reaction chamber with a powerhead on a timer to does RO water with food suspended in it.

[danny zubot]

It a good idea, but what kind of food would you put in the reaction chamber?

[trilinearmipmap]

I was thinking finely powdered flake food or Cyclop-eez and add new food daily and dump out the remains of the old container daily to avoid spoilage.

[LostMind]

I think it sounds like a lot more work then feeding two or three times a day

[Quinn]

They assert that they are feeding a variety of prepared foods.

I think a better solution would be a live food culturing system as has been discussed by Dwayne Sapp on RC and in RK Mag. His ideas are also labour intensive but I think the potential benefits of a stable live food source would be worthwhile especially for particularly demanding livestock (mandarins, seahorses).

http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2002-07/ds/index.htm
http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-07/nftt/

It seems to me that if one were so inclined, it would be possible to culture all the necessary foodstuffs for your tank. I expect it would be quite easy to farm various types of algae (including but not limited to caulerpa), and maintain either a culturing system as discussed above or a large refugium for feeder microfauna. One would need excellent filtration systems, however, as well-fed fish tend to produce a lot of waste.