Hey Vimes,

The general rule of thumb is not to feed your fish anymore food than
they'll eat in 5 minutes and to remove any leftover food from the
water.

I have never really adhered to these rules! I generally don't feed my
fish anymore food than they will consume in 2 minutes.

With a 10 gallon tank you will want to be extra careful not to
overfeed because you have very little margin for error with such a
small tank. Feed your fish small amounts of food several times
throughout the day as opposed to feeding them on big meal once.
It's also important to remember that fish are able to live long
periods of time without eating so you're not going to starve your fish
by underfeeding them.

As for crumbling up the flakes... I'd advise against doing this
because I've found that fish tend to ignore very small bits of food
and they just sink to the bottom of the tank and begin to decompose.

In the 10 years I've been keeping tropical fish I have ever tested my
water for nitrate levels. I've found that if the water starts to get
cloudy or smelly then you should start to worry!


Ryan
http://members.rogers.com/miniks/aquarist.html



On Sun, 21 Mar 2004 16:42:44 +0000, Commander Vimes
wrote:

Hi all,

I am new to tropical fishkeeping and have found this group an
invaluable source of advice whilst cycling my 10g tank.

What I have noticed in all the books and posts I have read is the
warning of not overfeeding the fish. Is this purely to do with the
nitires that are produced as the food breaks down, or are there more
sinister things I should be wary of.

Also I can find no decent advice on how much is too much. I have 3
dalmation mollies, 3 neon tailed platys, 3 red mickey mouse platys and
3 neon tetras (3 died during the cycle - should have read the
newsgroup before trying to cycle a tank with neons!). I feed them
flake food and I am sure I have a tendancy to overfeed as I keep
feeding until they seem to become dis-interested in the food. There
are no flakes left over (that I can see), althoughn this doesn't mean
that there aren't small bits in the tank or hitting the gravel.

If someone could tell me roughly how many flakes to throw in the tank
I would appreciate it. I also tend to crumble the flakes up a bit to
ensure even distribution of the food.

Another reason I think I'm overfeeding is the water tests show small
levels of nitrites (0.1mg per), but this may be beacuse I added the
platys a couple of weeks ago and the bacteria is building up to meet
the new levels.

Anyway, any advice on this would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks,

Vimes