Loaches Online Forum

Along with their usual pellets or flakes or Repashy soilent green and also grub pie, l have started giving my Weather loaches and also my pictus catfish some strips of raw minced beef, they absolutely love it, the gourami eats it from my fingers.
Anyone else feed raw..

Be careful with feeding raw meat from warm blooded animals.

In nature, no fish will ever encounter pieces of meat, and even a small mammal or bird is still 4 grams or more.

That is, apart from an Arrowana, all our fishes are not adapted to eating mammal or bird meat.

Mammals have a body tempreature of 37 degrees (Celcius), bird are even warmer. All cells are surrounded by a membrane, which will, at body temprature, be somewhat between liquid and solid. That is, in cooler temeratures these membranes will become solid, and therfore harder to digest.

Fish meat, inverttebrates, they all have far cooler bodies, which will not have this problem. And therefore, unless you keep Arrowana, you best feed your fishes no meat, whether mammalian or from a bird.

Thank you for taking the trouble to type that reply and it is certainly food for thought, I have thought similar when I see Piranha keepers feeding their fish with small mammals, so unbelievable cruel.
I only give them very small pieces and they really love it.

not wishing to sound facetious but sharks eat human limbs,

Sharks do eat human limbs, every now and then.

However,. I understand sharks don't like our taste, but more importantly, these sharks normally eat seals. Also warmblooded. Shars will, therefore, just as the arrowana I mentioned, be adapted to eating warm blooded prey.

Back to your fishes - I would suggest not feeding strips of meat, but strips of fish instead.

Yeah, probably not the best idea to feed red meat. I do recommend feeding seafood though (such as perch, red snapper, pickerel, or Chilean sea bass)

It may be used from time to time as a "novelty" gourmet food, but not as a staple food for loaches. For a regular use, no matter how they like raw beef, it would be better to rely on things that would be more natural for them, seafood being a prime example of that.

Sometimes, I either feed them small pieces of a fish I caught myself, or finely diced shrimp, I'm a little bit afraid to try something else since you can't bring your loach to the vet as you'd do with a cat or dog...

Ther best you can do is, indeed, bring the vet to the loach. And that only works if the vet is willing

Chopped precooked shrimp is a favorite in my tank