Fish need food. Otherwise they starve. Simple enough. But like you and me, fish also require that a necessary list of nutrients be in their food or they will slowly grow ill, and then will die. So how do you give your fish adequate nutrition?

Then there are the bottom feeders, like loaches and catfishes. What about them? If you feed according to the recommended five-minute rule, your bottom feeders won't get much to eat. Starvation is consequently one major cause of failure with catfishes, and over feeding in attempt to "make sure the catfish gets some" is another. In practice, however, things are not that bad and catfish can generally find enough to eat (remember fish need very little food). If you have a lot of catfish however, you should take advantage of the fact that most bottom dwellers are nocturnal and supply some sinking wafers when the lights go out. Make sure that this food is gone by morning. By feeding extra at night you are however walking a fine line between adequately feeding your fish and over feeding your fish. So be careful.

Blood worms are named because of their red color (it has nothing to do with blood) and can be collected from local ponds (see below) but never in quantity. They are an excellent food and highly recommended as a dietary supplement for all fishes.

A less expensive alternative to flake food is homemade food. If you like to cook, this can also be fun, although to be honest I tend to think of making your own fish food as a bit of a smelly chore. Thankfully, it is easy to make and freeze enough to last you a good six months or more so you don't need to put yourself through it very often.

The various other flake foods, like "carnivore flakes", "color flakes", etc. are in my humble opinion more useful as marketing strategies than as dietary supplements. Feel free to purchase a variety of flakes, but all good flake foods are heterogeneous mixtures of ingredients and supply complete nutrition on their own.

This is my recipe. I food-process several multivitamin tables (with vitamin C) to dust, then process about 1/2 kilo of the red meat portion of a beef heart (cut away from all the fat and connective tissue). Then goes in a good handful of spinach leaves (no stems), one young whole zucchini, and a few raw carrots. Then the bulk of the food is added, which is whole fish. The fish I originally used were those minnows sold as bait, but I have since discovered Shun Fat, an Oriental supermarket in Forest Lawn (at 3215 17th Ave, SE). Here you can get a wide assortment of frozen sea foods. Nowadays I buy a kilo of frozen capelin since they are full of nutritious roe. I also get a frozen 1/2 kilo bag of something called "shrimp fry". I am not sure exactly what this is (some form of krill I think) but it's a lot cheaper than buying real shrimp, which I would have to do if this wonderful stuff weren't available. I also add 1/2 kilo of mosquito larvae and Daphnia that I had collected myself and froze previously (see below for a discussion on live food collecting).

Many live foods can be raised at home, and the culture of lived foods is a huge topic in its own right. I'll just mention a few foods and try to direct you to more information. A good place to start is in the CAS library, which has a book called the Encyclopedia of Live Foods. This book covers almost all the topics discussed below and several more.

Many fish either require vegetable diets or can benefit from them. Most notable for requiring vegetables are the plecos (South American algae eating catfishes), silver dollars (vegetarian relatives of the piranha), and mbuna (rock-dwelling cichlids from Lake Malawi, Africa).