Raising Live Foods for Tropical Fish and Small Animals

Live foods are a great supplement to the dry flake foods typically fed to aquarium fish. Tropical fish grow faster and are easier to breed when fed live foods as part of their diet. In fact, most killifish are very difficult to breed unless they are conditioned with live foods. Fortunately many live foods are easy to culture.  Culturing can be less expensive than buying live foods such as brine shrimp and black worms.

Although I feel live foods are an important part of breeding and raising tropical fish, I am not a fanatic about it.  I also feed my fish commercial dry food.  I do this in part as a supplement to live foods, partially because I don't always have time to feed anything else, but also because I don't always know who will be getting my fish.  I sometimes get killies that won't eat dry food.  If fry are given dry food early in their lives they will accept it as adults.

You will need to get starter cultures from someone. Check with local aquarium clubs. The active fish breeders will almost certainly be culturing several different live foods.  There are also people advertising live food cultures on the Internet.

These are some of the live food critters I culture to feed to my tropical fish