juanico wrote:vijendra_s123 wrote:VishaalDalal wrote:Well the best thing would be to select the fish accordingly. People who are not able to keep live food should avoid keeping fish which cannot do without it... as finding other alternatives will not be good for the fish in the long term....
Dont agree to this as we have done this to all the fish that today accept pellets and other manufactured food
Well I still stick to it, By choosing the fish carefully I am talking about fish species who are finicky eaters and not all fish. Some wild caught fish species who are not fussy eaters will readily accept packaged food but there are stubborn fish like the badis that only prefer live food, no matter how hard you try. Trying to get such fish on pellets will not keep them happy and just feeding them to keep them alive and feeding to keeping them happy are two different things.
Its true that we have managed to get the fish that we keep on accepting pellets and other manufactured foods but dont you think that it is also one of the reasons for quality degradation which appears in the next generations apart from other strong reasons such as inbreeding. Today a wild caught fish is of a far superior quality than a tank bred one which is quite evident by how it is priced in the market (Quality is also one of the reasons for a wild caught fish to be highly priced apart from other reasons such as difficulty in sourcing them).
A fish would prefer live over pellets any day, well a majority of fish accept packaged food as they dont have an option but to starve. If you glance through the ingredients then most of the items are fillers (except for some premium brands) which are not able to fufill their nutritional requirements.
Someone has rightly said that what we eat is how we are and I guess it applies to all living creatures and not just humans.
i agree completely. everybody wants to keep challenging fish and other pets, but most people are not ready to provide the conditions those fish/pets need.
just because a fish survives does not mean it is happy!
and btw: great pics and breeding effort
I have often heard fishkeepers defensively say that their fish are alive, and therefore they must be happy. I am often tempted to ask them that if they got only bread to eat and lassi to drink, they would probably live for some time ( a year?), would they be ready to try it simply because it is possible? ..... luckily, i manage to control,,,, lol. They guys who overcrowd fish also have a similar warped logic. If something isn't dead yet, it MUST be happy.
Badis badis, reflect health (good or bad) like mirrors: badly fed, they develop terribly concave bellies, beige or similar colour (actually the result of bleaching out of the chromatophores, i think), hide endlessly or jump around in panic without warning (sometimes out!). Well fed they transform into one colour dress after another, sometimes in a matter of a few hours. This Alfa male used to go all black also, so much so that i thought he might be a different sub-species, and i even asked Andrew Rao about it. Later i realised it was his 'protective father' dress. The internet told me that healthy Badis have over a dozen dresses (colour patterns) that reflect not only the fish's health but also what stage of breeding/courting/intraspecies aggession/brood care it is currently in.
So this genus is really for the hardcore observer fishkeeper; the fish will offer its best to an owner only if it feels at home, has a full tummy, and feels well enough to act naturally. ... Otherwise, you will find a drab listless fearful creature cowering in a corner of your tank. You will look at it and wonder why anybody would want to keep a Badis, it does that badly. A tank well stocked with a hardy species of shrimp (glass shrimp) with no other fish species to eat the shrimplets, lots of seed shrimp (ostracods), some gammarus.... might be able to keep them alive for a few months without feeding. But they that food would run out too, badis are efficient hunters. But pond snails (physa sp.) are good to keep in the same tank. The most long lasting food of all, but even that...
