electric yellows

[MikeWs Fish]

I just aquired a colony of yellows. Peviously they were housed with frontosa (7 bars) so i imagine they were fed lots of meaty foods. I have tried to feed them spitrul;ina flake and pellets but they dont seem very interested. I put some brine shrimp in there and a little blood worms nd they ate this happily.

Is it ok to feed yellows brine shrimp (as staples)? My gut feeling is no.... Ideally i want them to be eating sera veggie pellets which most of my mbuna eat by the bucket and do very well off.

They are generally quite healthy and they bred for the 1st time in my posession the other day.

[cobaltcraig]

Hi Mike

I have feed my mbuna and cichlids HBH foods for about free years now

I alternate from HBH Cichlid flake 3 to 4 days a week and feed then HBH vege

on the other days

I have found these foods to give good colour and growth

Cheers

Craig

[MikeWs Fish]

Thanks for the reply... I have a 1/2kg bag of hbh spirulina/veggie flake but they dont seem to like it and seem to much prefer frozen food like brineshrimp. They also dont take to pellets very well. I've gotta some how train they to eat pelets. They have trouble swallowing it although they arent that big.

[Setup]

mike, I feed them TetraBits and Sera Guarila when i had them. No meaty food at all.

[hungsta]

My yellows dont seem to eat hBH spirulina pellets at all, they do eat AOA bits, HBH cichlid attack.

But my staple for them is Sera Flora.

And brine shrimp and frozen food every now and then.

HTH

[MikeWs Fish]

mike, I feed them TetraBits and Sera Guarila when i had them. No meaty food at all.

Ok kewl. Can i feed them those things as staples?

[hungsta]

tetrabits should be fed sparingly, unless you want your yellows to be more orangish...

[MikeWs Fish]

They are quite nicely coloured. lemon peel colour. One or two of them has some black in patches on them. Any ways to get the black out and more yellow/lemon peel colour?

[hungsta]

Hey Mike,

The lemon colour yellows are what i have as well, any chance of some pics?

I have read that feeding too much spirulina will cause black blotches on the fish, does your yellows have black patches or barrings?

I have been feeding yellows spirulina as a supplement and the black on the fins are more striking.

If it is black barring then, its most likely be due to inbreeding or could be that they are still stressed and need time to settle in to their new tank.

[MikeWs Fish]

ill get some pics up soon. They do have black bars, but only when they are scared or stressed. when they are just swimming around there are no black bars etc. The black i was tyalking about is a couple of black dots her and there.

[Gav]

when yellows have excessive black on them its becuase of less than ideal genetics. certain foods will highlight the flaw, and if you feed them right you won't see it. but it doesn't remove the genetic trait to show black.

high quality yellows show no black except on the fins no matter what you feed them

[CThompson]

It is my understanding that yellows are not the standard mbuna in that they are not vegetarians in the lake. Look at their mouth, and compare it with for example a cobalt. There is a big difference in their mouths as one has evolved to eat the algae off rocks where the other is not.

I understand also that the reason yellows are not as aggressive as other mbunas is due to their not being vegetarians. They don’t have to defend a patch of turf to call their own so they have somewhere to call their own to eat from. Instead, in the wild they roam, and hunt their food.

Perhaps part of the reason why yellows are good at eating snails.

So if I was you, I wouldn’t be concerned about feeding meats to yellows, provided the meats have marine/water origin (i.e. not beef heart and so on).

Anyone who thinks my knowledge/understanding is incorrect, please feel free to explain my error.

Craig

[chorrylan]

inneresting.... my electric yellows will eat absoluely anything I put in the tank. (ok I haven't tried anythign stupid like dirt yet but you get the general idea )

Theoretically their natural diet includes more protein and live food like small snails and such than most mbuna but I've always been a bit cautious about feeding too much animal protein to them.

Mine get a varied diet, usually 3 or 4 days a week on OSI cichlid flake, a couple of days on OSI spiruilna flake and maybe a day with spirulina pellets or the NSWCS trade-table ones.

Mine love the pellets even though they take a bit of eating (and carrying around before they can deal with them)

[MikeWs Fish]

There is one fish which has poor colour. another fish has two black specs on its face. The rest of them are pretty much perfect besides the odd scratch. I think i might give those two away or something like that. Maybe use them as dithers for my demasoni.

What is the best food to feed them. I feed my mbuna those sera mini veggie pellets. Cant remebre the name of them. They are small green and round. The yellows dont take to them very well : (

My first time keeping labs too so i didnt known that they can have more animal meat (such as snails) then most peudos.

[hungsta]

Mbuna are exclusively Herbivores (with the exception of Labidochromis). They spend all day picking and scraping at the thick mat of algae that covers the rocky shoreline of Lake Malawi. This algae is their primary staple, which is supplemented with the insects and crustaceans that live in the algae. While Mbuna, officially, are vegetarians, they will eat almost anything that can fit in their mouths. Careful attention to their diet is required if you want to keep these fish healthy.

The digestional tracts of Mbuna are made for vegetable matter. They have long intestines designed to extract the proteins and carbohydrates from the hard-to-digest algae. Cows and other ungulates use several stomachs to digest grass. Mbuna, on the other hand, do it with only one stomach and a very long intestine. If you feed them too much animal protein (e.g., worms, shrimp, feeder fish), it will only be a matter of time before they develop an intestinal blockage, swell up, and die from the infamous Malawi Bloat.

mbunas

This article did mention shrimp, which is marine origin. Even though i do have prawns in my frozen mix, i feed them sparingly and they seem to thrive on it.

Like Laurie said i would rather be more on the cautious side. But then again i have seen people feeding their yellows bloodworms and will swear by it for good growth. But that is their opinion.

[CThompson]

(with the exception of Labidochromis)

Yellows are labidochromis (unless they’ve been changed) .

Pretty much backs up what my thoughts were.

Craig

[anchar]

Hi Mike,

I feed my yellows on sera flora for the majority of their diet, with supplementary portions of brine shrimp. I did an experiment over a period of a few months whereby I "sacrificed" 12 yellows by feeding them soley on high protein aquaculture pellets (50% protein). In this time I lost a few and they all darkened (black blotches) considerably. They are basically herbivores and should be kept that way IMO.

merjo

[hungsta]

Hey Craig,

Lol i shouldnt skim read.

BTW What wouold be a safe percentage of animal protein from marine origin for the yellows?

[MikeWs Fish]

With the exception of the yellows, I have all my mbuna either eating thise sera veggie pellets or OSI spirulina or the HBh spirulina from the NSWCS 1/2kg bag things.

They are all GRUBS! and when i say grubs, they are absolute pigs. You can hear the water splashing when you walk into the room coz they are all lining up for food.

I have erecently bought quite alot of new fish. some of them (not the yellows) were kept poorly and were in quite bad shape when i bought them. They are getting better and eating spirluina flakes (not yet graduated to pellets.)

How do I coax the yellows to eat vegetables? They dont seem terribly intertested. even with spirulina flake they take a bit, munch it, then spit it back out. I have to get the net out and scoop up all the excess food off the bottom before it starts rotting.

I tried giving them brine shrinmp and they seem to eat it quite willingly, with the exception of the one with a MF hehehe

[hungsta]

I would try slowly to introduce either a veggie or spirulina based flakes and supplement with brine shrimp.

Even though they are not exclusively herbivores, they are afterall mbunas and their intestines are designed for eating veggies.

Supplementing brine shrimp also helps bring out the colour.

My new fish do not adapt to to new food very well and always take a few days to a week before they are GRUBS. Just take your time, if they are hungry they will eat anything.

[MikeWs Fish]

hehehe at least when they are 'GRUBS' you 99% of the time know they are happy and healthy, even if they do eat you out of house and home.

[hungsta]

hahaha, there was a period when they were eating prawns, salmon and having supplements such as spirulina and i was having canned and freezer food.

They sure eat you out of a house and home

[teejaybee]

I feed my yellows 'cichlid dinner' frozen food and OSI cichlid flake. The babies get crushed OSI cichlid flake and mosquito larvae. The babies are a nice bright yellow with no white blotches and grow at a good pace. The breeding colony breed like rabbits... Good bloodlines too though - F2, parents from Germany.

Good luck.

[CThompson]

Hungsta,

Right or wrong, this is the basis of how I think about it, as best demonstrated when I make up my own frozen foods.

I blend up all my ingredients, keeping the veggie separate from the meats. When I mix together, for the meat eaters, I put in ¾ meat, ¼ veg. For the vegetarians, I put in ¾ vegetable, and ¼ meat.

I try to approach my feeding dry foods with the same proportions, using a veggie flake on same feeds, and meaty foods on other feeds, hoping for a ¾, ¼ mix

This all gets complicated though when you look at the content of foods such as Sera Flora, or the more popular Spiralina which list their first ingredients as fish or fish derivatives (words to that effect).

I look at it this way, a vegetarian will not pass up a bit of meat and a meat eater will not pass up something edible in the greens department in the wild. If you feed on the weighted side of what ever group you are trying to cater for, from my experience, the fish would be okay.

I think it important to remember here, that contrary to the way fish behave at feeding time, they get a heap more food from us than they do in the lake, as evidenced by the fact they grow bigger in our tanks than they do in the lake. In paying attention to the nutritional requirements of our fish (meat or veggie) one also needs to note that we need to cut down on the total bulk of the food we feed.

Fish are cold blooded, which means they are not spending a large proportion of the energy they ingest by heating their bodies (as we do). They do eat all day, but it’s just little bits here and there, and the end of the day I feel they would be eating far less in the lake, eating all day, than with us just getting 2-3 feeds a day.

I believe we need to feed our fish often, but probably a fraction of what most of us (including me) feed their fish. This will also help in regards to fish getting sick from foods that evolution has not designed them to consume (particularly in bulk).

This gets more difficult if we have a large population of fish in a tank, where all the food would be consumed (if we adopted a minimalist approach) in a very short time before the less able have the opportunity to get to it.

Yes I know Waz, another long reply

Craig

[Willy Wombat]

When you are changing a fishes diet to something new it is quite normal for them to spit it out when they first taste it. For example, if they are used to getting frozen BS, or pellets, and you start feeding them flake, then most fish will usually spit it out the first few times they eat it. You need to teach your fish to associate the new food as 'a food', by introducing it slowly when you are feeding.

For example, feed a few brine shrimp and add a little bit of the other food. Gradually decreasing the amount of brine shrimp you feed in successive feeds and increasing the amount of the other food at the same time. It may be they dont eat it at first and you need to siphon remining food out, or leave it for your catfish?, but over time (as long as it is a good quality food) they will start to eat it.

For this reason it is important that you ask someone what foods they have been feeding fish when you buy them, so you dont get them home and change things too quickly.

IMO Most captive-bred fish can be weaned onto any kind of food eventually, but it just takes time.

Cheers

WW