Hello friends! Today let's talk about betta and snail foods. Fishtubers say that it's healthy to give your betta fish a variety of foods rather than the same thing all the time, so I have several options that I switch between for CuChulainn.
His basic pellets are Hikari Betta Bio Gold, which I just transferred to this little jar because I kept spilling them in their original container.
For treats, I have freeze dried bloodworms. These are basically betta crack, lol, he loves them!
I got freeze dried daphnia because I read that bettas were prone to constipation, and these had a lot of fiber to help with that. I don't know if it matters on that score if you get freeze dried or frozen, but I think in future I might try frozen because when I feed him these it's a very fine powder, and he ignores all the tiniest bits and only eats the somewhat larger pieces, so a lot of it goes to waste.
And finally, because frozen food is closest to fresh and ergo is supposed to be healthier for them, I got some frozen brine shrimp. These are also betta crack, he gets super excited when I give him some. These I keep in the freezer.
The Snails
Nerite snails, which is what Macha and Sanglainn are, are notoriously difficult to feed anything besides algae in your tank. Since my tank doesn't grow a lot of algae, this resulted in me having low key panic that they were going to go hungry, and trying different foods to see what they might eat.
In addition to algae and diatoms growing in the tank, they also eat the catappa leaves I put in there which are also healthy for bettas as they release tannins which help their immune system and lower stress.
I tried making snello, various fruit and veg, algae wafers, snail cookies, snail pellets, spirulina sticks, and a different brand of calcium chips that they all just ignored. Panic!
Thankfully, I discovered they will eat unsalted green beans, white (not garnet) sweet potato, and Kat's Aquatics calcium chips. Phew!
My next two things to try are growing algae on rocks in a jar so I can just plop an algae-covered rock in to the tank (I just sanitized some rocks to do that today), and mopani wood, which others say they will eat as well.
So there's the report on foods I feed my aquarium friends. What do you all feed your fish and snails?