home made coral food

[martym]

kuatto, if it is blended fine enough for corals, do you just drop it into the tank frozen so the fish can eat it, or do you do different "blends"?

[MitchM]

Originally Posted by dekay

This must be a stupid question, but how exactly does a coral like frogspawn eat? I've yet to see any of my corals consume food (mysis, brine). The whole time I was thinking they're surviving off phytoplankton.

Kinda like a miniature anemone. Depending on the species, small polyp stoney, large polyp stoney or soft corals (in general) will all take different sizes of food. I feed my euphyllia larger items like silversides.
Gently place a silverside in the tentacles, and the coral will grasp it and slowly pull it in and digest it.
Oppurtunistic feeders like shrimp will take the food right out of the coral, even as it's digesting, so make sure that you give some smaller pieces to the shrimp first.

Mitch

Originally Posted by StirCrazy

freeze dried is about the 4th best ways to preserve food. fresh has the most nutritional value, frozen is next, flash freezing, then freeze dried. the process of freeze drying destroys some ameno acids and proteens which is why it is not as nutritious as the others.

Steve

if you want to get really technical and compare percentages that really wont make a substantial difference, then yes freze dried is not as good as frozen, and flash frozen comes before frozen in quality as flash freezing freezes the product before cell breakdown occurs, with regular freezing the cell walls break down and release alot of nutrition, in the form of oils. this is easily seen in mysis shrimp, when flash frozen they remain intack and the product is much cleaner, when frozen normaly, the cell walls break down and the mysis shrip get surrounded by a soup like oil, its great for feeding corals, but not the best for some aplications. when we flash freeze the mysis shrimp on the boat, they are alive in the bags on the trays and 60 seconds later they are flashfrozen and preserved.

[kuatto]

I usually blend it real fine(using the blender).My lion gets the whole pieces of sea food mix.I found that when I dropped in pieces of the "frozen mush",the fish ate most of it before it could reach the corals.By diluting it in some tank water and using a baister,the whole tank got blasted with food,everyone was happy
You can pretty much mix the way you want as long as the sea food is raw(or frozen)with no additives like spices and such.
Just make sure not to use the "good blender"(still hearing about that one! )

Jim

[EmilyB]

Tiger prawns are shrimp, you can usually buy them thawed in single pieces or get a bag that will last forever.

I use a recipe that includes shellfish and krill as well.