Aquarists know that dietary variety, including live foods, is important for inducing spawning condition and growing out strong, healthy fry.
One of the fishfood ingredients that has proven of great benefit is spirulina, a type of seaweed used in the formulation of many commercial fishfood products. It has been shown to help increase yellow colors and intensify reds, but has little effect on the metallic blues, which are guanine based.
Another way of getting spirulina into your fishes’ diets is to feed them live food organisms that have been fed with spirulina powder. This “gut loading” technique has been proven to work with a number of live food organisms, and with a number of additives.
“I feed my [grindal] worms [spirulina] flake a few hours prior to feeding the fish, then harvest the worms from the area where the food was,” says Karl Johnsen.
Richard Sexton feeds spirulina in a prepared food. “You can buy commercially available foods … or you can make your own mixture at home. I make one with a shrimp base and add assorted vegetables, etc.”
“I use spirulina powder to feed my daphnia culture, then an hour later feed the daphnia to my fish,” says Ross Cronkhite. “I’ve also added spirulina powder to my microworm culture. Everything, including the worms, turns (a really ugly) green. What surprised me was the intensification of the red color of the daphnia in the hour before feeding them to my fish.”
– GCKA Newsletter, May 1999