Is it okay to feed my koi small pieces of bread in my aquarium.?
by Aquaboy on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 | 3 Comments
I was wondering if it would be okay to feed my koi some bread, the only thing
is i’m worried it will cloud the water.
We have a backyard, free-flowing, spring fed pond in which we have 15
large kois, catfish, brim, turtles, and a few bass, and it’s large enough to park about
4 school bus in, and they love, I mean love bread.
It won’t hurt mine will it, I’m raising it from a baby so it can grow large enough to be placed
in the pond with the others.
You can but it has little to no nutritional value for kois.
Very small amounts of bread will not hurt. Just bear in mind that it is not very nutritious for them. As a treat, you could consider feeding freeze dried tubifex worms. My goldies love them. They are a good source of protein also, which can help your koi grow. As soon as it is at least 2 inches long, it should be big enough to go in the pond with the others. If you keep it inside for a while, you may be able to teach it to eat right from your fingers. Some of my older goldies will do this. Especially for the tubifex worms!
Watch out for overfeeding koi. They’re opportunistic feeders – if food is there, they eat it, even if they aren’t hungry. They’re also scavenger eaters – reasonably unselective on what they put in their mouths.
While dropsy still has questionable origins, some dropsy (pine cone) of koi has been linked to overfeeding resulting in bloating and kidney failure. The next step is pet cemetary. There’s an x-ray of a koi with dropsy at
http://www.fishdeals.com/fish_diseases/dropsy/ (scroll down)
It’s better not to use fish enthusiasm for food as an indicator of how much to feed. A good rule of thumb is watching their ‘waist’: if they get bulbous from top view or profile, stop feeding them for a bit. Their sides should be gently rounded but not ‘beach ball’ round. They aren’t growing faster with more food in their stomach. They grow on food they’re actually able to digest. The rest goes to poop or worse, constipation.
For their own safety and health, control what they eat as well as their portions.