A scientific approach to feeding fish in aquariums?

[Cory]

I think I'm guilty of underfeeding my fish in some tanks. I don't see any of my fish visibly skinny or anything. But when I compare how much I feed a fish tank to others, I think I'm low.

I'm thinking of perhaps finding out the weight of some fish, then estimating how much should be fed. In commercial catfish farms they use something like this:

Body Weight Feeding (percent BW)
At 50-60º F, feed 0.5-1.0 percent BW (or 5-10 lb feed/1000 lb fish, daily) using sinking feed;
At 60-70º F, feed 2.0 percent BW (or 20 lb feed/1000 lb fish, daily);
At 70-86º F, feed 3.0 percent BW (or 30 lb feed/1000 lb fish, daily);
At 90-95º F, feed 0.5-1.0 percent BW daily;
Above 95º F, feed no more than 0.5 percent BW every three days.
Note also that the percent BW fed changes with fish size.

In theory we could do the same thing. My obvious goal would be community fish as I think that could be the most accurate. As you could say , for each neon tetras. it weighs. X. Where saying an oscar weighs X wouldnt be true. You could say a 5 inch oscars weighs X, and a 7 inch weighs Y etc.

Gotta do some more google fu to see if I can find these numbers already. Otherwise I gotta buy an accurate scale

 

[Cory]

First piece of info. A chart, now to find some more to see if these seem reasonable.

http://www.fishchannel.com/fish-health/ ... -fish.aspx

 

[Madness]

Interesting

 

[Betty]

I don't know if this helps, but it's all I could find. http://jn.nutrition.org/content/136/7/2081S.long

 

[Cory]

I found that article as well, just felt like it should have been longer and more in depth

 

[Jay]

Very scientific way to do it.................very cool! Curious your results!

 

[dleblanc]

How can you weigh a bunch of fish? I know how you'd weigh catfish - net them all, hold up the net, they're big enough we can ignore the water. But if we wanted to weigh a bunch of tetras or something like that, you'd stress them by having them out of the water.

If you can figure that out, I have a scale good to 0.1g that I could bring over.

Something you could try, but might not work well - kind of thinking how this would go - seems like you could say start with a liter container full of fish and water, and weigh it. Remove the fish, trying not to take much water with the fish, now weigh it again. For every gram less it weighs, you've removed that much in fish. It might work, no idea how accurate it would end up being.

 

[Cory]

Mpstly if we can estimate weight it could be useful. Like 1 two inch neon tetra weighs roughly x. Then if you have 50 of those and 20 guppies. Might be easier to feed 1oz of food etc. A estimate similar to how ferts are dome maybe.

 

[MorganEA]

could you weigh a container and water then add the fish? and see how much was added?