Loaches Online Forum

is it ok to give botias aubergine? please forgive my ignorance, but i really dont want to poison them

Sorry, i've never tried them. Neither have my Loaches.

Aubergine is lovely, but I've never given it to my loaches. As far as fruit and veg go, I've only tried mine with cucumber and melon!

Emma

I really wouldn't to be honest.

I don't know why people feed their fish anything terrestrial its so unnatural.

No loach eats any significant amount of fruit or land veggies in the wild.

Its conceivable that if a very nice fragrant food with a lot of fructose (like a fruit) fell near a loach it might eat some, but loaches eat inverts and baby fish and bugs and worms and very soft squishy vegetation that grow underwater...

To me its like feeding beefheart I just don't see the point.

A lot of folks do these things with good results just my two cents

Stick with thin slices of "English" cucumbers - the seedless kind. I found, over the past three or four years, that the loaches tend to eat as much of it as they can, so the water ends up more polluted than you need. A half-inch slice is plenty.

I know of no reason why they couldn't be fed aubergine - there are no toxins in eggplant that you need to avoid, as far as I know.

I don't buy angelfish83's complete write-off of feeding fruit & veg. All of my Botias partake of cucumber: they like the stuff a lot. It's mostly water, anyway. I would think that vegetable matter probably makes about half of a Botia's natural diet given their delight in eating certain aquarium plants and the ongoing success so many keepers have had with courgettes and cucumber.

I feed romaine, zucchini, cucumber & peas. They like them & it helps keep them from eating my plants. Gives them something to do. I'd say try the aubergine but maybe just before a water change in case it gets mushy & falls apart. That's what happened after a short time when I gave banana. There were only a few tiny specks left but I worried about the fruit sugars allowing bacteria, fungus or algae to grow. I tried broccoli too one time after seeing a pic of loaches eating it. The clowns ate a little but the striatas & sids just laid on it. Messy & stinky, yuck.
Nancy

thanks for all your advice. i must admit i chickened out in the end. the stuff we had for tea wasnt very nice, so i thought id give the fish bloodworm instead. at least then i know some in my house had a nice tea last night! i was abit worried about the bitterness associated with aubergine to be bad for the fish.

i can image banana must have been hard work to clean out of the tank Nancy. i bet the fish all had grins on their faces though

cheers everyone