aubergine?

[helen nightingale]

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

[Graeme Robson]

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

[Emma Turner]

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

[angelfish83]

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

[Mark in Vancouver]

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.

[NancyD]

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

[helen nightingale]

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