Feeding with pellets - best method

[Pandas1st]

Last night I fed my corys sinking pellets for the first time (I've never used sinking pellets with any of my fish). The corys were immediately attracted to them, but it was close to an hour and a half before they could made a dent in them.

I wonder if other people soak their pellets before putting them in the tank to soften them up.

Thanks.

[racoll]

I wonder if other people soak their pellets before putting them in the tank to soften them up.

Apparently, most of the vitamins are lost if they are soaked. You'd be better off feeding them flake, which they can immediately consume.

[Richard B]

Pellets can be ground up into a rough powder to make them a more suitable size for smaller fish - pestle and mortar or rolling pin and a polybag does the trick.

Different brands and types of pellets have different softening times and it's worth trying a few different ones - for example, Apistomaster feeds earthworm sticks (a particular brand)to his cory hastatus i think, and they are a small fish.

Modern flake food is brilliant and contains everything most fish need - i spoke to one of the top 'lab guys' from tetra once and it was fascinating.

My personal choice however is to provide as varied a diet as possible all the time, targetted towards individual species needs. For example, for my pair of common bristlenose, in the last week, have had, cucumber, courgette, aquarian tropical flake, earthworm sticks, aquarian algae wafers and malawi cichlid pellets.

[Pandas1st]

Thanks for the replies. I will try crushing these pellets.

I do give a varied diet. These panda corys are getting earthworm flake and a mixed overall nutrition flake daily, plus on different days either dried daphnia, frozen adult brine shrimp, dried blood worm, live black worm or live grindel worm. I'll be getting some frozen blood worm also in the near future.

[Firestorming]

I feed my small and relatively common species of cories a 1mm pellet and some of the grow formula from the same company. They seem to manage it quite well.