What is the best live food for Oscars?
Guppys, Mollys, or Ghost shrimp. Will be raising my own. Which is the easiest with best results. I know not to feed live from store and to have more than live in their diet.
Tagged with: diet • ghost shrimp • mollys
Filed under: Living Foods Diet
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You are on the right track, the "best" live food for any fish is food that you raise yourself so you know its’ history. Depending on the oscars’ sizes, you miht want to start them on guppies and then go to mollies which are larger.
You should also do what is called "gut loading" of the feeder fish. That means feeding them lots of high protein food just before tossing them into the oscar tank. That way, the oscars get the benefit of the food that the feeder fish ate in addition to the fish themselves.
Just be aware that there is not a lot of food value in live feeder fish unless you feed quite a few of them at a time and frequently.
Oscars do not need live food. I kept 5 oscars in a 125 gallon tank for years and fed them good quality, high protein large dog food pellets. Yep, that’s right, dog food pellets (dry). They loved them. I also gave them treats of frozen food too. Fish, white fish, from the grocery store is great for them. Just cube it up and freeze it on a cookie sheet. Pop it into a zip lock baggie and feed whenever you want to give them a treat.
You are definitely right about feeder fish from the fish store, they have caused more problems than they are worth. Too many parasites and diseases come with them from the ponds they are raised in. Good luck.
i say guppy
it depends on the size of the oscars! The live fish should be the "treat", not the main food.
I think they become more aggressive eaters if you use live too often.
a varied diet is a good diet… Guppies & mollies are really easy to raise and they breed easily too.
oscars like worms, crickets too. Watch where you catch them for insecticides, and herbicides. You can feed it regular fish food too (pellets).
oh, and chunks of fish & shrimp from the grocery store will work too.
The best is to provide a variety of food. Guppies would be the best bet. Snails are great too. Do shrimp as well so there is variety. As many different things as you can do is best, but the main thing is to get a good cichlid pellet as their main food, and supplement their diet with live foods.
I used to raise guppies just for that. They bread like rabbits.
Guppys. Guppys are cheaper to buy and are just fast enough to not be eatten all at once.
A combination of earth worms (cheep) and gold fish (expensive)
I gave mine 5 worms one day and one fish the next.
There’s plenty of types of live food you can use. When someone refers to ‘the best’ for a certain fish, I see that as mimicking the natural diet. In this case, Oscars in the wild feed mostly off of insects and crustaceans, with some worms and insect larvae in the mix as well. They eat very little, if any, fish.
Crickets, crayfish, shrimp, prawns, worms of all available types, insect larvae (bloodworms) are all healthy supplements. Feeder fish are probably the easiest to breed yourself though in the end, but you can find most of these foods as frozen or freezedried, which are almost, if not quite, as good as live.