Everybody prefers home-prepared food despite visiting restaurants and hotels often. It is often viewed as ideal from a health point of view. Have you thought about Flowerhorn’s food? If yes, you might also have wondered what home-prepared food you can serve your beloved Flowerhorn?
You can give Flowerhorn home-prepared food like blanched veggies such as small cucumber slices, zucchini, carrot, shredded lettuce, and peas. In addition, flowerhorn consumes fruits like papayas, mangoes, pears, apples, and bananas.
Likewise, Flowerhorn mostly consumes and prefers non-veg foods like salmon, shredded herrings, bloodworms, crickets, shrimps, grasshoppers, bloodworms, fish flakes, and anchovies. It does consume algae flakes and wafers. Therefore, you can prepare a nutritionally rich mixed feed combining all these different food available at home.
Well, Flowerhorn devours each and everything you put into the tank. But you need to ensure the quantity and quality of the feed you serve to them.
Here in this article, I am providing some detailed information regarding the home-prepared food for your Flowerhorn. Hope this is helpful enough. Make sure you read this article to the end.
What Are Home Prepared Food You Can Make For Your Flowerhorn?
Flowerhorn is an omnivore in nature; it consumes both plant-based and animal-based products. Entitled “Greedy Eater,” your Flowerhorn proves the term given.
Having a huge appetite in nature, Flowerhorn consumes everything dropped into the tank. However, as your Flowerhorn cannot distinguish the good and bad food for itself, it may indulge in eating aquarium flora and algae in the delay of feed. Hence, it’s your sole responsibility to provide the timely feed required by your pet.
Most home-prepared food is divided into two major categories.
Plant-based Food
Plant-based food is the source of fibers and eases your Flowerhorns digestion. A wide range of plant-based food not only aids in variety but enhances the gut health of your Flowerhorn.
Flowerhorn normally consumes everything. You must be careful enough to select food that does benefit your pet. You can even classify plant-based food into two categories: fruits and vegetables as such.
Fruits
You can give apples, bananas, mangoes, pears, papayas, and melons to your Flowerhorn. Then, if you are not sure whether your Flowerhorn likes them, you can just introduce them a little as a test food. Eventually, you can increase the amount according to the response shown by the Flowerhorn.
All you have to do is take fruit and clean it properly. Then, peel the fruit, and cut it into the desired shape but mind the mouth size of your particular Flowerhorn and cut it accordingly.
Some flowerhorn might love the raw taste and does not need blanching. But, on the other hand, some may encounter indigestion problems that need blanching.
I recommend you blanch the fruits if you are feeding them for the first time. Your flowerhorn would just love the fresh, juicy, and wholesome fruit.
Vegetables
Flowerhorn does consume vegetables like zucchini, lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, carrot, cucumber, and peas.
Veggies can break the long non-veg chain of feed and enhance gut health. Vegetables even relieve them from constipation and bloating that results from continuous non-veg meals. But, like fruit, you need to take a vegetable you plan to give and wash it properly.
Make sure you peel it off and cut it into bite-size pieces for your Flowerhorn. This is because your pet just ignores off-sized veggies or any food that aids in contaminating the tank and nothing more.
The next step you do is blanching the veggies. This process enhances digestibility and lessens the workload of the digestive system. Then you can put the veggies in the tank and watch your pet gulping the veggies happily.
Animal-Based Food
Flowerhorn is an omnivore and thus consumes animal-based food too. Animal-based food or meat are the favorites of your Flowerhorn. There are normally different forms of meaty food. I have mentioned some of the forms below. Let’s have a look at it.
Frozen Food
Frozen food is another category of feed for your Flowerhorn. Generally, meat-based frozen food is available in the pet store or the grocery store. You can always replace live food with frozen food, which is safer than live food.
Owning a pet is not an easy task, and you, too, might have frequently faced the problem of feeding your Flowerhorn. “What to feed my Flowerhorn?” is the most common question.
To get rid of this, you can feed nutritionally well-labeled frozen food such as salmon, krill, shrimps, bloodworm, etc., that are easily available at the store. You can prefer it as a good source of feed for your Flowerhorn.
Some of my suggestions are:
- Hikari Flowerhorn Fish Food
- OKIKO flowerhorn Cichlid Fish
- Fluval A6581 Bug Bites Cichlid Pellets
- Amzey Dries Shrimp Fish Foods
- Appetizing Shrimp Mealworms
- Tetra Jumbokrill Jumbo Shrimp
- Ocean Pellets Humpy Xo Flowerhorn Food
Live Food
Feeding food like veggies, fruits, and even frozen and cooked meat is quite boring for your Flowerhorn. Flowerhorn loves to have live foods such as small fish, krill, minnows, shrimps, etc.
Live food makes your Flowerhorn more active, jolly and contended. Your Flowerhorn’s interest in food increases when live foods are introduced. They can even show their aggressiveness over feeder animals and satisfy themselves.
Live foods are the source of trace minerals and vitamins. In addition, live fish are fresh and have not undergone any processing, making them nutritionally rich compared to other frozen and dried food.
All you need to take care of before feeding live fish is to buy from an authentic source ensuring they are free from parasitic infections.
Why Should You Provide Home Prepared Food For Flowerhorn?
Feeding only the pellet makes your pet’s diet monotonous and boring. Variety aids in nutrition, as well as food, seems exciting.
Home prepared food is considered not only healthy but economical too. So you don’t have to rush out in panic while running out of fish food but can feed some home-prepared food to your Flowerhorn.
It is always wise to feed home-prepared food and the pellet and other commercial fish food available. This provides varied taste and enhances appetite.
What Can’t You Feed Your Flowerhorn?
Remember that you should not feed beef, pork, mutton, or chicken regularly. These meat items, if provided regularly, build up fat within the fish. The fat causes problems in the reproduction of your Flowerhorn.
In addition to this, excess fat affects the liver, which is responsible for the metabolism of food. I strongly suggest you not feed the meat as mentioned above. However, you can rarely introduce organ meat as a reward or treat for your Flowerhorn.
How To Start Giving Home-Prepared Food For Flowerhorn?
You can always start with a small portion and then increase the portion size. The likes and preferences are the keys to making your Flowerhorn happy. Understand them thoroughly first before concluding.
For this, you can choose any one of the foods available at home and try feeding them. If your Flowerhorn does not show interest in that particular food, try a couple more times. Still, there is no progress then change the food.
I suggest you introduce a single new food in a day. If you introduce a new food within no time of feeding previous, they can not figure out the taste and flavor of the particular food, which puts them in a dilemma. Variety is undoubtedly important; however, including a huge variety at once is not good.
It’s always advisable to blanch the vegetables and fruits before introducing them. The Flowerhorn might not suddenly cope with the raw food, resulting in bloating and indigestion.
How To Make Home Prepared Food For Flowerhorn?
There are different techniques for preparing home-prepared food. Some Flowerhorn keepers prefer mixed food, while some feed a single variety depending on the convenience and Flowerhorn’s preferences.
The mixed food needs a proper blending in a mixture that is in a puree form which makes your tank dirty.
While the whole food like bite-sized cut veggies, fruits, meat like salmon, and bloodworm doesn’t contaminate your tank to that extent compared to pureed ones.
Thus, different keepers choose different ways of feeding their pets. I personally emphasize both ways depending upon my feasibility.
This does provide variety to my Flowerhorn’s food palette. I have listed some of the ways to prepare food at home. Hope this will be helpful for you and your Flowerhorn both.
Vegetables
You have to wash the vegetables you’re about to feed properly. Also, cut into the desired shape, keeping in mind the bite-size Flowerhorn. Blanch if you are introducing yourself or uncomfortable with raw veggies. Then feed them.
Fruits
The process of feeding fruits is similar to that of vegetables. Wash, peel, cut, blanch, and feed these fruits to your flower horn in a small bite size. Remember to remove the seeds or anything hard to chew.
Live Food
Wash/clean, ensure they are free from parasitic infection, and feed. Flowerhorn loves organ meat like the heart and liver of chicken. You have to cook or boil organ meat before feeding your fish. Flowerhorn also prefers live food like small fish, krills, mosquitoes, minnows, etc.
Mixed Food
You can mix all the food: veg and non-veg, including blanched peas, cauliflower, carrot, boiled organ meat, shrimps, etc., and make a thick puree. You can prepare this mixture in bulk and store it in a refrigerator for future use.
Is Home Prepared Food Better Than Commercial Food?
Well, both the home-prepared and commercially available pellets have their significance. So we can’t just claim that one of the kinds is better than the other.
Each kind of food holds different advantages and drawbacks. Therefore, it is advisable to incorporate both home-prepared and commercial food to acquire maximum utilization of the nutrients.
Despite comparing the food, you have to analyze the components such as vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids, and other nutrients available in each kind of food and incorporate them to obtain maximum benefits for your Flowerhorn.
Can You Feed Only The Home Prepared Food To Your Flowerhorn?
Home prepared foods like shredded lettuce, finely chopped carrot, thin slices of zucchini, and blanched peas are the great source of fiber that eases your Flowerhorn’s digestion and makes them feel light.
Likewise, live foods like grasshoppers, shredded shrimps, and salmons consist of proteins, essential fatty acids, and vitamins and minerals.
We can’t deny the fact that commercially available food pellet consists of all the nutrients that Flowerhorn needs. Furthermore, if you are a newbie, you can easily follow the guidelines from the packaged food.
Eventually, you can prepare and feed homemade food to your Flowerhorn. Hence, it’s wise to mix both commercial and home-prepared food rather than sticking to one of a kind.
You might overlook the nutritional requirement of your Flowerhorn while sticking to the home-prepared food.
Meeting all the necessary nutrient requirements like minerals and vitamins and protein, and energy becomes difficult unless you provide a huge variety of home-prepared foods.
You can not extract a concentrated form of these nutrients by using home appliances and equipment from the foods available at home.
Given these points, I am not discouraging you from feeding home based-foods. However, you have to be aware of your pet’s essential things.
Thus it’s better to incorporate both the home-prepared food and commercial feed unless you become a pro in fish keeping.
How To Feed Home Prepared Food?
It is no rocket science to know how to feed your aquarium fish. However, you are probably feeding them food for so long now to understand how to drop it in the tank.
Feeding homemade food to flowerhorn is not different than feeding them commercial fish food. All you have to do is take a small amount of food you have been preparing and drop them slowly in the tank.
Also, if you are trying to feed them fruits or such, you can keep them in the petri dish and put the Petri dish at the bottom of the tank. Then, remove the dish and let the flowerhorn devour the food they can reach.
Trust me; it is as simple as dropping a few pellets in the tank. You don’t have to worry about the techniques or skills of feeding your flowerhorn.
But remember to look at the amount and number of times you let your flowerhorn munch on their daily snacks. Do not go overboard and overfeed your aquarium fish. It will only result in obesity and unwanted fish diseases that are best when you keep them at bay.
Does Home Prepared Food Meet The Nutritional Requirement Of My Flowerhorn?
Yes, it does meet the nutritional requirement of your Flowerhorn, but you need to have a proper idea and knowledge of the nutritional content of particular food.
Unless you know the exact amount of nutritional facts like carbohydrates, proteins, fats, minerals, and vitamins present in the particular food, it’s difficult to know whether your pet is getting enough nutrients from the food you are providing.
Let us suppose your Flowerhorn needs 2 gm of protein per day. You have to meet its protein requirement through the food available at home. Here, without knowing the amount of protein present in the food you are going to feed your pet throughout the day, you will not know whether you met the nutritional requirement of your Flowerhorn.
All I mean to say is you might not have an idea regarding the food’s nutritional facts. You can always prefer commercialized products from the market, study the beneficial ingredients for your pet, have proper research, and jump into the home-prepared food if you plan to stick only to home-prepared ones.
What Are The Benefits Of Home Prepared Food?
You probably know the benefits of home-prepared food as it eases your daily routine of feeding your Flowerhorn. In addition, home-prepared food has enormous benefits, some of which are in the following bulletins.
- Home-prepared food is cost-effective. You can prepare this food on a low budget.
- You don’t have to rush out of the home in search of fish food if you run out of the pellets.
- These foods are free from extra preservatives and chemicals that are used to increase the shelf-life.
- Home prepared foods are fresh and healthy and have quite a different taste and flavor, which your Flowerhorn loves.
- You can prepare them at any time of the day, depending on your convenience.
Disadvantages Of Home Prepared Food?
Everything has pros and cons, and so does home-prepared food. Let your Flowerhorn get habituated with one food, then introduce the other. Besides its practical advantages, it has some disadvantages.
- The shelf life of home-prepared food is comparatively less than that of commercialized food.
- You might feel tedious to assemble the ingredients and perform preliminary preparations.
- Actual nutritional values are difficult to calculate.
- You might not get the idea of the quantity of food you fed to your Flowerhorn.
- The home-prepared food is not as easy to feed as commercialized pellets.
- This food might contaminate the water more than the normal fish pellets available in the market.
- The nutritional imbalance might result from the random feeding of home-prepared food.
FAQs
I have collected a few most commonly encountered queries and answered them for your convenience. Hope this extra info pleases you.
Can I Feed Algae To My Flowerhorn?
Algae contain all the essential amino acids needed for the Flowerhorn. In addition, the alga is a source of complete protein. Hence you can feed algae to your Flowerhorn.
Commercially algae flakes, wafers, and pellets are available in the market. You can incorporate those algae products with normal fish food and feed your Flowerhorn.
Does Flowerhorn Eat Apple?
Of course, “Yes.” Flowerhorn consumes apples. Not only apples, but Flowerhorn eats various fruits like mangoes, papaya, pears, melon, bananas, etc.
Flowerhorn receives micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals from the fruits. Try to avoid a monotonous diet and include variety in your Flowerhorns diet.
For How Long Does My Flowerhorn Go Without Food?
Flowerhorn can survive for around 14 days. Some studies even show evidence that a Flowerhorn lived up to a month which is quite unusual.
However, this seems an exceptional case which does not mean you too can leave your pet without food for such a long period.
Though your Flowerhorn can live without food for a few days, the vibrant color fades away, and the big head hump shrinks without a scheduled quality diet. Thus it’s better not to let Flowerhorn remain hungry.
How Often Should I Feed My Flowerhorn?
The thumb rule is to maintain an 8 hours gap between the two feeds. Thus it’s wise to feed yourself three times a day to your beloved Flowerhorn.
This schedule pleases your Flowerhorn’s digestive system and satisfies its hunger cues. Overfeeding is not recommended as it affects both the gut health and the tank’s environment.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Flowerhorn is a breed that never says no to food. It’s economical to prepare home food and becomes a lifesaver when running out of fish food. You may mix both home-prepared food and pellet feed to meet the hunger cues of the Flowerhorn.
But, at the same time, there is nothing better than feeding your fish what you prepare with your hand. Knowing what goes inside the mouth and stomach of your pet is truly calming and soothing.
If you still have questions for me, then drop them in the comment section below. I will happily answer each of them for you.
Good Luck!!
Happy Fishkeeping!!
