Fish Friday – Vacation Feeding

Vacation Feeding your Aquarium residents

Something that always seems to get the owner of an aquarium into a tizzy is vacation feeding. People feed every day (or more) when they’re in town. They want their wet friends to have the same care and treatment while they are gone–or at least make sure the fish don’t starve to death while the people are gone.

Opportunity Feeders

What many people don’t realize is that fish are opportunity feeders. They have ample opportunity in captivity, but in nature, fish can go a long time without eating. Opportunity comes along, they go into a feeding frenzy because the fish doesn’t know when or where the next meal will be.

Because of the opportunistic nature of the way fish evolved to eat, almost all aquarists overfeed–and that can include the experienced. It’s easy to understand why–for many people, feeding is really the only interaction they have with their pet. But fish are more observation than interaction pets, and restraint is in order when it comes to feeding.

Bad Feeding

Some people are so concerned about feeding that they drop one of those pyramids into the water. These are worse than useless. All those do is foul the water so you come home to the need for an immediate water change. Given that many aquarists do water changes far too infrequently, the fish might have to live in this soured environment for a long time.

The Reality

I stopped feeding my fish when I leave. I had never really been concerned with skipping a day or two of feeding unless I have fry in a critical stage of development. That doesn’t happen all that often.

I had a discussion about this with a fellow member of the local aquarium societies–a breeder who has at least ten times the tank volume I do and breeds show-quality fish. He goes to Asia and returns without feeding his fish. Not even fry. He has never gone more than two weeks, but he thinks he could get away with three before they start having problems. Remember, most of us overfeed. Keep in mind what overfeeding does to humans.

The Real Problem

The real problem, at least for somebody in my climate (Sonoran Desert), is the heat. That does have to be contained, so having climate control, whether automated or manual (e.g. neighbor) is far more important than is feeding.