What compound feeds are used in aquarium hobby.
Currently, new types of dry foods are becoming extremely widespread. These are feeds made using new technologies and are almost complete substitutes for live food. At your nearest pet store, you can find many dry foods in the form of flakes, granules, and tablets, as well as solutions and gels. These feeds can become the basis of your fish’s diet. Today, many companies around the world produce industrial dry food for aquarium fish.
Among them are such well-known and reputable brands that can be safely recommended to amateur aquarists as Tetra, Wardley, Sera, JBL, Tropical, Otto, Nutrafin, Dennerle, and others. Aquarists have gained the opportunity to significantly enrich their pets’ menu. Certain difficulties have also arisen: how to figure out all this variety (especially considering that the prices of imported feeds are by no means low), which company to prefer? In principle, similar feeds from different companies are almost equivalent in their nutritional value. Differences mainly concern packaging, package design, price…
Some companies care more about the consumer: they provide detailed information on the label (purpose of the feed, its biological and mineral composition, expiration date, etc.), pack the feed in convenient and reliable containers of various capacities, allowing it to be stored for a long time and easily extracted from the packaging. Others pay minimal attention to such “trifles”. So choosing a company is more a matter of your taste than that of the fish.
Modern dry foods provide fish with all necessary nutrients, vitamins, and microelements, and yet, it should be noted that feeding your pets with the contents of only one, even a very beautiful jar of the most brand-name food, is not very humane. Try eating a very delicious, but always the same dish day after day, and only it — nothing else! The conclusion here is as follows: there should be at least several of these jars of fish food, and preferably from different companies.
Is dry concentrated food alone sufficient? If there are live plants in the aquarium, in most cases it is enough. Many fish successfully supplement the menu you offer with fresh young shoots and leaves. To prevent them from stripping everything clean like goats on a small island, you need to avoid overpopulating the aquarium, take special care of the plants, and timely replant new ones if necessary. The current fashion for plastic plants does not contribute to the health of poor fish at all. Do not forget that they spend their whole life within four glass walls and can eat only what you offer them.
There is no doubt that today it is easier and more convenient (and more reliable) for an amateur aquarist to feed the inhabitants of their aquarium with brand-name dry compound feeds. However, unfortunately, not all fish can be kept exclusively on dry food all the time. About half of the fish species kept in amateur aquariums today require at least periodic inclusion of natural frozen and live foods in their diet, and some (about 5% of the aquarium species kept) cannot be switched to dry diets at all. For most fish, it is advisable to combine feeds: for example, combining valuable dry foods (with *Spirulina* and other herbal supplements) and frozen natural foods that contain natural biologically active substances.
For fish living near the water surface, flakes and dried natural products are the ideal food. For fish inhabiting middle layers, granular food is best. For bottom-dwelling fish and those in lower layers, granular and tablet food is preferable. Growing fish and those with small mouths should be fed micro-granules. By the way, when organizing water flow in the aquarium, positioning filter outlet pipes and diffusers, always remember about dry food. Water flows in the aquarium should be distributed in such a way that the food thrown into the aquarium is carried by the current to an open space, toward the front glass, and under no circumstances gets stuck behind decorations, under driftwood, or in dense plant thickets.
It should be remembered that an excess of dry food in the aquarium is extremely harmful! Unlike frozen natural foods, which begin to rot in the aquarium only after a few hours, dry food flakes in water with a temperature of 30°C begin to oxidize and decay in literally an hour, and their prolonged stay in water leads to a sharp deterioration in water biology, an excess of organic matter and nitrogen compounds, and an completely unjustified extra load on the biofilter.
Modern industry offers aquarists a wide range of dry compound feeds for all occasions. However, keeping fish exclusively on dry foods, no matter how high quality they are, cannot be recommended for most aquarium inhabitants. Of course, there are exceptions — species capable of living and reproducing for several generations without any visible damage, feeding only on flakes and granules, but the vast majority of aquarium species require natural protein foods.
For breeding forms, these feeds cannot completely replace live food. All these substitutes for live food are incomplete in their composition. It is not advisable to use them for a more or less prolonged period. Many adult fish can be fed only dry food, they will not die and will even reproduce, like for example *Poecilia reticulata*, but the offspring in this case will be weak and the coloration faded. With such maintenance, it is impossible to obtain beautiful males with a good veil and bright coloration. Most fish species, especially egg-scattering ones, when fed dry food and even if it is alternated with natural food, cannot reproduce, and some fish do not accept dry food at all.
Types of artificial food. Quality dry foods.
Frozen fish foods. Preparing frozen foods ourselves. 
