Loaches Online Forum

So like the title states, what is your clowns main diet

I vary their diet as much as I can but the two main foods I use would be New Life Spectrum 3mm sinking pellets and HBH Shrimp Pellets.
My Clowns are 5" - 7" so the larger pellet size suits them well. They also get zuchini,live black worms,krill,Hikari carnivore tabs and algae disks,bloodworms and brine shrimp. Cheers Graeme.

My clowns are in that ballpark but, i feed mine them NLS 1mm, tropical flakes (can't seem to get them off of it), algae wafers, and sometimes treat with frozen bloodworms.

Hi there,

Main foods are :

Tropical Flake
Algae tablets
Blood worm (frozen and freeze dried)
Cucumber
Courgette


Some treats are :

Sweet corn
Melon
Chicken
Fish
Prawns
Lettuce leaves

I tend to vary their diet as much as I can; although some of it depends on what we eat as well (I always give them some of our seafood/salad)

Stonecoloured

I also try to vary their food, but they seem to be willing to try anything. They eat:
Omega One Super Color Flake
Omega One Shrimp pellets
Hikari Sinking Cichlid pellets
Algae wafers
Freeze dried tubifex and bloodworms
Freeze dried krill
Broccoli
Zucchini
and sometimes their tankmates

Their staple food is TetraPrima, but they'll eat most things with mussels and prawns probably their favourites.

Floating and sinking pellets, meat & veggie wafers, fresh veggies, fresh or frozen seafood (Shrimp, Cod, Tilapia, Mussels, Clams), frozen bloodworms, and live home-raised snails.

Ditto the above: As much variety as possible.
Almost Natural Tropical Fish Food products, and fresh from the kitchen foods, home made frozen food.

whatever's in the fridge that has a fishiness: conch, prawns, tinned tuna, salmon. Also hard-boiled eggs, zucchini, cucumber, akee, chicken heart, dead lizards/frogs I take from the cat, carrots, clams, crab, lobster, pill-bugs, compost-maggots, ant eggs, "scuds", aloe, assorted pond-snails, guppies, live algae and watercress and whatever they seem to find in the substrate... which seems to be a lot. They also do well on angelfish eggs. Take care not to feed anything that's freezer-burnt. Also take care that your prawns are not from places that use particular antibiotics/chemicals in the rearing process as these are often fish toxic (not to mention human carcinogenic).
Oddly they don't really like earth-worms.
Staple is actually high-end "Science Diet" cat food, as the wife's hypochondriac/spoiled rotten cats won't eat it once it gets stale in the bowl. Fish love it and are looking brilliant for it.

I have 8 small botia striata. Can I feed them tinned tune? or is it not good for them. I fed them a little today and they seemed to like it.

Staple is FGP deworm and earthworm flake plus cichlid floating, cichlid growth and small cichlid pellets. At weekends they get cucumber, and frozen food: bloodworm, mix, daphnia, chopoed cockles/mussels/greenfood.

Also fed; JMC catfish pellets + massivore delice + tetra prima in that order.

Thanks for the replies. I guess I have to perform a search to find my own posts? I have a couple of clowns approx. seven inches in length. I have tried a couple of different veggie treats with no luck. They nibble a little bit but just are not interested. The only treat I have found they absolutely go crazy about is bloodworms. They have spent most of their lives eating a variety of bottom feeder specific foods. I read an article on natural habitat and behavior of clown loaches recently and one section got me wondering. It stated that clowns are naturally carnivorous but are omnivores when they have to be. So I grabbed their food to look at the ingredients and sitting next to it is a bag of sinking carnivore pellets. I dropped a few in and the clowns went nuts. They absolutely love them. The problem is I have a couple of other fish(in other tanks) that eat these also and I just cant afford to use this as a daily diet and am looking for some alternatives. I will defiantly go through your suggestions and give them a try.

New Life Spectrum Thera+A ( main food)
TetraMin tropical crisps
Tetracolor tropical granules
TetraVeggie flakes
Whiteworms 2 x week
Brine shrimp 2 x week

Their favorite food is garden snails. But they only get these snails in the rainy season.

Their main diet is a mix of Almost Natural Tropical Fish Food products: Some are more algae and vegetable based, other foods are fish and shellfish based.
I also feed brine shrimp, bloodworms and many other frozen and freeze dried foods, plus the home made frozen food based on Martin's recipe.

mine eat a diet like the above (flakes, algea and shrimp pellets, sinking pellets, zucchini...they get treat of blood worms once or twice a week). I wish I offered more (any) live foods.
Every once in a while I have caught a garden worm (they are very speedy, so this was hard to do....
They LOVED it.
I am thinking about figuring out how to grow my own worms. I have read about "worm composters", so why not just a "worm farm" under the sink. I am alittle nervous it might stink, but I guess only if overfed, right?
I do not know how to do it, but I'll bet there are some out there who are already raising their own worms for the fish.
How hard can it be?