Baby food

I just wanted to find out what food has worked for you guys when raising fry apart from the usual brine shrimp which is difficult to find in durban.

 

Egg Yolk of a cooked egg mixed with a little milk.Strain through a very fine sieve or clean pantyhose.
Inexpensive and very rich in vitamins.

 

Depending on the size of the fry you could also use Dirks no 1 granules. Or you do get commercially available foods as well which I guess you could also use along with Slojo's suggestion of the egg yolk.

 

Frozen Rotifers or Bosmids.....order from Prof Dirk. It's cheap, effective and you won't have to get that nasty egg smell in your water

Cheers
Dale

 

Unfortunately it tends to smell bad!

 

Yes, I used egg yolk before in the beginning stages of breeding and after a couple of days, the water smells very yucky!
Best thing, get the frozen foods from Prof....works like a charm

 

wow seems like profs food comes highly recommended

 

The frozen foods especially saved me from having to keep microworm cultures to raise betta fry. I actually don't use live foods anymore, just the frozen stuff. Works fine for me.

 

Dig up earthworms from the garden and smash them up. The fry love it - even really picky buggers like the bumblebee gobies when they are still new & demand live food. But be careful with wormies from the garden. If you don't wash the soil out very very well, you end up with live bloodworms in your substrate - they don't survive unless you have adult fish in there too, but I didn't keep adults with the fry. I got to see their whole lifecycle this way last year. Eventually they metamorph into little midges (a smallish mozzie type thing) and float to the top of the tank.

Also try normal fish flakes crushed very finely between your fingers. I have never found fry that didn't eat it.

 

Prof Dirk No1 Granules

 

Something i discovered a little while ago while muckin about the net is fairy shrimp, they are like brine shrimp but without the brine i.e. they are hatched in fresh water. This means no rinsing, nasty salt water and it makes feeding your frys easier as they are right at home in fresh water and wont die in a few hours like brine shrimp. I have never seen or even heard or them being available in SA but don't seem too expensive on ebay http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid=p3907.m38.l1313&_nkw=fairy+shrimp&_sacat=See-All-Categories

 

And most of them is endangered.There is 5 species.

 

There are actually about 200 known species of which 5 are threatened or endangered the ones on ebay are not of either the threatened or endangered.
Reference - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_shrimp