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Feed your fish!

Why is it that so many aquatic shops under feed their fish? Asks PPM Aquatic correspondent Jeremy Gay.

I'm a fish fanantic through and through and my life, my hobby, and my work take me to hundreds of aquatic shops every year. I've even worked in five aquatic shops myself, as has my girlfriend, so I think I can tell the difference between a good one and a bad one.

But what makes a good shop to the average store manager is often at odds with what I want from a good shop, and at odds with what the average hobbyist wants.

Shelving

When I go on shoptours I take notice of all areas in an aquatic shop from fixtures and fittings to POS and livestock, though my main priority is always the fish. Some proprietors and owners will try to wow me with their shiny new tanks, dry goods areas and I've even been forced to look on at a new lift!

They try to get us to take photos of their new shelving too, convinced that that is what the fishkeeper will want to see, when really it's just them being a bit anal. After all, if people want to look at shelving in their spare time they'll go to Tesco, right?

Fish health

For me what makes a good shop is not one with a good selection of fish, but a good selection of healthy, well fed fish.

The past ten years has seen the much wider use of test kits from both retailers and hobbyists, which is great for detecting and even preventing problems, but I think that it has also created a culture of over cautious fishkeepers.

In PFK we always used to ask for a tip from the retailers we visited. A recurring answer would be not to overfeed your fish.

Fair enough I suppose, and this has carried over partly from the days of goldfish bowls and partly from people thinking that fish used to die from overfeeding, when it was actually the ammonia from uneaten food that did the killing. But one thing I noticed from all the retailers who told me not to overfeed my fish was skinny fish in their shop tanks.

Famine

I can't help feeling sad when I see thin fish of all kinds, as with the exception of a few algae eaters, unless we put food in, there is nothing for our fish to eat.

A well-fed fish is a healthy fish - more likely to breed, more disease resistant, more active and it will also grow, meaning that you can put the price up.

Thin fish look stunted and lifeless. The extent of the problem is so widespread I would say it occurs in at least sixty percent of the UK's aquatic shops.

Why let it happen?

What makes me even more sad is that as well as being full of fish, aquatic shops are also full of food, yet is seems beyond some people to put the two together.

You even get free food offered in the form of sponsorships, yet again people are more worried about their nitrate values than the immediate health of the actual fish themselves.

I put it down to poor staff training, lack of decent staff in the first place, due to low pay and long hours, and fish just being treated as products instead of live animals, deserving of a duty of care.

The solution

Skinny fish can easily be turned into well fed ones however, just by a bit of attention to detail. If you are holding say 200 Neons in a two foot tank, they will need more than the small pinch per day that you may recommend to the new fishkeeper with a community tank.

Feed regularly - at least three times per day for most fish - and some of the healthiest fish I have ever seen in a shop were fed five times! Vary foods. It's not all about flake and you should be feeding freeze dried and frozen too, along with the myriad of sinking tablets, wafers, granules and pellets that are available.

Have you ever fed an algae wafer to a tank full of guppies? Try it. Frozen cockle to Clown loach? Experiment, and surprise surprise people seeing you feed fish will generate sales of food. The oldest trick in the book is to stick a tablet on the glass of every tank and you will sell tablet foods all day long as a result.

Win, win situation

And what you get from all of it in the end is more disease resistant, hardy fish, which will fare better once sold on, more successful fishkeepers who come back to buy more food and more fish, and when their own fish go on to grow and breed - more tank sales too.

So if you're sat on your lunch break stuffing your face while reading this, spare a thought for those danios stocked 200 to a tank, and swimming against the filter outlet flow 24/7. They might just be in need of a feed...