What To Feed Fish Fry?
5. Feed Tiny Foods Multiple Times a Day – Fry have tiny mouths and stomachs, and similar to human infants, they must eat continuously throughout the day. Fish are born with a yolk sac that feeds them until they are strong enough to swim and seek food on their own.
- Then they require multiple small meals, preferably three to five times per day.
- For larger foods, you can set alarms on your phone or use an automatic fish feeder.
- The tiniest fry (e.g., rainbowfish and tetras) should be fed microscopic foods such as green water, infusoria, fry powder, and vinegar eels.
Larger fry (such as livebearers and African cichlids) can consume crushed flakes, Repashy gel food, and Easy Fry and Small Fish Food almost immediately. Feeding your fish fry live brine shrimp larvae is the best way to promote their growth and health.
- However, every veteran fish keeper and fish farm knows that live baby brine shrimp are the best food for fry to promote optimal growth and reproduction.
- Not only are they packed with nutrient-dense proteins and healthy fats, but they also actively swim in the water column, triggering the predatory instincts of your baby fish so that their bellies are filled with tasty, pink crustaceans.
If you have never attempted to hatch your own baby brine shrimp, consult our detailed guide and give it a shot. 
How frequently must I feed my fish fry?
Livebearers – Livebearers, or fish that give birth to live young, are relatively easy to feed. There are guppies, mollies, and swordtails among these fish. By the time they are expelled from their mother’s body, these fish are typically large enough to consume pulverized flake food.
Utilize a mortar and pestle to reduce the food to a fine powder. This powder should be sprinkled into the fry tank. This may not seem like much, but frequent small feedings are optimal for fry, even more so than for adults. Try feeding this small amount of food multiple times per day. If the aquarium becomes cloudy, perform a water change and reduce the amount of food.
While this diet may provide enough protein, a wider variety of foods will provide more. A healthy addition to their diet is live brine shrimp. In addition, prepared foods for livebearer fry are available for purchase at pet stores. Increase the size of the crushed flake and decrease the frequency of feedings as the fish grow.
What is the best food for fish that are hatching?
Feeding Stages – Newly hatched fry have extremely small bodies and can only consume the smallest foods. However, their nutritional needs are demanding due to their rapid growth. This stage is crucial because newly hatched fry can die of starvation quickly.
- At this stage, the best foods include infusoria, newly hatched brine shrimp, and green water.
- These foods must be readily available as soon as the fry hatch, as they cannot wait even one day for their preparation.
- If the previously described foods are unavailable when the fry hatch, egg yolk preparations and commercially prepared fry foods are excellent alternatives that do not require a great deal of preparation time.
After one or two weeks of life, fry are typically large enough to consume the same foods as their parents, albeit in smaller quantities. Almost all purchased flake, pelleted, or freeze-dried foods can be ground to a size that fry can consume. This article describes simple steps for preparing your own fried foods using commonplace equipment.