Baby Flowerhorn or fryling are fragile and vulnerable. They need special care and attention in the initial days for long-term health. Nurturing your frylings at the beginning of their life includes their feeding too. Do you know what to feed your baby flowerhorn?
You have to feed different food to your baby flowerhorn, such as infusoria, brine shrimp, hard-boiled egg yolk, and crushed pellets. Then, slowly you step to feeding brine shrimp, frozen bloodworms, daphnia, mosquito larvae, etc. Finally, you can even feed powder food.
The information above might confuse you, and any queries related to food might arise. Thus, to get more information about feeding baby Flowerhorn, I suggest you go through this article to the end. I hope you find this article helpful.
What To Feed Your Baby Flowerhorn?
Well, babies are always vulnerable, and you need to allocate more time to them than adult fish. You need to take precautions and feed them properly to avoid any epidemic or loss.
You need to feed different food at different stages to ensure rapid growth, including the baby stage of flowerhorn. For this, I have differentiated food depending upon the ages of fryling or baby Flowerhorn.
After Hatching To 4-5 days
They still possess egg sacs until the fry reaches the free-swimming stage or four to five days. This egg sac provides nutrients to the newly hatched frying. Thus, you don’t have to feed anything extra till then.
One To Two Weeks
Start feeding with infusoria, hard-boiled egg yolk, etc. You can eventually introduce baby brine shrimp. Likewise, you even can feed powdered or crushed fish pellets. You have to feed 4-10 times per day as the nutrient requirement of fryling is very high.
Feeding this often might pollute water; thus, you need to change water frequently.
After First Few Weeks
The nutritional requirement of the fry will increase at this point in age; thus, you need to increase the quantity and quality of the meal. By saying this, I suggest you introduce a high protein diet like live daphnia, scuds, or small shrimp species.
The growth rate of each fry is not the same. Thus, at this point, you need to separate bigger flowerhorn babies and smaller ones.
Two To Three Months
Here, you can introduce flake food, worms like blackworms and white worms, and other meat products like crickets, mealworms, bloodworms, Mysis shrimp, etc.; these foods are available in live form and frozen and dried forms.
What Are The Benefits Of Feeding Baby Flowerhorn?
Food is the energy source for all living creatures. Therefore, there are immense benefits to feeding your baby Flowerhorn. I have jotted down some of the benefits.
Energy And Bodybuilding
The food you feed to your fry will either provide energy or help in growth. Carbs, protein, and fat from different sources of food such as fruits, veggies, pellets, and meat: frozen, dried, or live, provide an adequate amount of energy and helps in the bodybuilding of Flowerhorn.
Growth And Development
Food is the most important for the growth and development of your Flowerhorn. You need to meet the nutritional requirements of your Flowerhorn for its rapid growth and sustained life. You may lose your fry when you don’t feed adequate food to your Fry.
Growth Of Hump
Hump slowly starts to grow in Flowerhorn fry. When your Flowerhorn reaches 1.5 inches, the hump starts to develop. You have to feed a proper meal to see the growth of hump in your Flowerhorn fry.
Color Enhancement
Quality of diet and quantity of feed directly impacts the color of your Flowerhorn. As the fry grows, the color also enhances, but the color fades away without proper feed. As a result, the vibrant color will not appear in your Flowerhorn, certainly disappointing you.
Control Aggressiveness
As Flowerhorn is naturally more aggressive than other fish breeds, delay of feed creates more aggressiveness in your Flowerhorn. They will show aggressiveness in other tank mates, normally another fryling in the tank. That might even lead to the death of some baby Flowerhorn.
What Are The Disadvantages Of Overfeeding Baby Flowerhorn?
Overfeeding is not good for your baby flowerhorn and the tank’s environment. Overfeeding causes many digestion problems and other ample disadvantages to your baby Flowerhorn. I have listed some of those negative effects below.
Digestion Problems
Overfeeding does hamper the digestive system of your baby Flowerhorn. Although your baby Flowerhorn’s nutritional requirement is more, overfeeding does no good to them. Indigestion problems, constipation, and bloating might result from overfeeding.
Contaminates Tank’s Environment
The leftover food from the baby Flowerhorn goes and settles down on the substrate, which results in polluting water. The contaminated water enhances infections among the fry, which is already fragile.
You need to clean the tank often if you overfed fry. This creates an unnecessary workload for you and stresses out your fry too.
Encounters Infection
Overfeeding might lower the immunity of your Flowerhorn; thus, they might encounter infections easily. Bad rearing practices and lack of sanitation too lead to infection. Moreover, the leftover food in the tank aids in incrementing ammonia, enhancing the foul smell.
How Often Should You Feed Baby Flowerhorn?
Whether a baby human, animal, or fish, growth is rapid in the initial days after birth, to support this rapid growth, you need to provide sufficient food to your baby Flowerhorn.
During the initial weeks after hatching, you have to feed around 4 times per day. As the nutritional requirement of the fry is high, you should give more time and care to the fry.
As the fryling grows, you can eventually reduce the feed times to 3 times a day until it becomes an adult. It is so because your adult Flowerhorn needs a minimum gap of eight hours between meals to maintain a healthy digestive system.
What Is The Best Food For Baby Flowerhorn?
Despite the variety of food, you can feed the fryling, there is some really good food for the baby Flowerhorn. This includes live foods. Although there are other good foods and you can feed those too, here I am only talking about the best.
Live Food
Live foods are the best source of proteins and essential nutrients like vitamins and minerals. You probably might know that live food is away from processing; they contain trace minerals.
Moreover, Flowerhorn enjoys live food due to the activeness of food. Live food like brine shrimp, daphnia, super worms, mosquito larvae, bloodworms, earthworms, etc.
Live food has an extra advantage that does benefit your fry more than any other form of food due to its freshness and liveliness.
Despite ample benefits, these live foods are capable of transmitting parasitic infection. Thus, you need to ensure that they are free from such infections and buy from an authentic food store. Here are some of my recommendations for live as well as freeze-dried flowerhorn food.
- 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
What Are The Points To Consider While Feeding A Baby Flowerhorn?
There are great points that you should consider while feeding your baby Flowerhorn. Fryling is naturally vulnerable and is at risk. Due to this reason, fish keepers like you should provide a little more care to them and consider the following points while feeding frylings.
- You need to consider the amount of feed as per the nutritional requirement of frylings.
- A number of times, you should feed them. You can feed fries 2 or 3 times per day.
- It would help if you kept in mind the types of food you need to avoid.
- Need to know the categories of food that help in the smooth growth and development of your Flowerhorn.
- It would help if you observed whether each fry is getting enough food or not.
How To Know You Are Overfeeding baby Flowerhorn?
Whenever you overfeed your baby Flowerhorn, they will show less interest in the food. They become less active than usual, lose aggressiveness and feel uncomfortable.
The other way that you know you overfed your fryling is to see if any food particles are at the bottom of the tank or not. Food excess than requirement settles down on the substrate and contaminates the water.
Mind extra particles in the tank; these particles release toxins by clogging the filter. Hence you should strictly avoid overfeeding your fryling.
FAQs
How To Make A Baby Flowerhorn Grow Faster?
Growth depends on diet, nutrition, and environmental factors like temperature, pressure, pH, etc. Even hygiene and sanitation of the tank, water quality, and filtration either directly or indirectly affect the growth of Flowerhorn.
You have to introduce healthy, nutritionally rich food in the proper amount and time to make them grow faster. Likewise, you also have to change the water frequently, maintain incorrect pH and temperature and ensure sanitation of the tank for the faster growth of the baby Flowerhorn.
How To Decrease The Death Of Baby Flowerhorn?
The death of a baby fish indicates so many things. First, it questions the nitrogen cycle, tank size, and tank mates with which you are keeping your fry.
Likewise, fish death even doubts water parameters like temperature and pH. Among these many factors, the disbalance of a single parameter might result in the death of the fryling.
In addition to this, the tank’s inadequate diet and filthy environment are the basic things that might also result in the death of baby Flowerhorn.
Thus if you master these parameters and maintain a healthier tank environment, you can reduce the death of your fryling.
How To Maintain A Favorable Environment For Baby Flowerhorn?
You need to ensure that your tank has good filtration. Also, make sure the water quality in the tank is good enough, along with the size of the tank.
You have to observe whether the baby Flowerhorns are getting enough space in the tank for mobility. You can even maintain a favorable environment for baby Flowerhorn by changing the water regularly.
All these reduce the chances of infection in the tank and maintain a healthy environment for baby Flowerhorn.
Conclusion
As baby Flowerhorn is very fragile and needs special attention, you need to take care of their diet. You can feed them a highly nutritious, proteinous diet for proper and smooth growth and development. Live food like brine shrimp, daphnia, super worms, mosquito larvae, bloodworms, earthworms, etc., are the best source of protein. You can even feed fish pellets, powered frozen, sun-dried, and other commercialized fish food, ensuring your fryling meets its nutritional requirement.
I hope this article addresses all your queries about feeding Flowerhorn fry or baby. For more information on Flowerhorn and other fish breeds, you can visit our website, Fishkeeping guide.
Happy Fishkeeping!
