Lou Ekus explains that phosphates in fish food are intentional preservatives, not byproducts, and can spike tank levels. He prefers pellets over frozen food because they pack more nutrition into fewer feedings. He recommends Dr. Bassleer Biofish Food, made from wild-caught Scandinavian whitefish, and suggests using smaller pellet sizes with multiple daily feedings or an auto-feeder.
Questions this video answers
Yes — Lou Ekus states phosphate is used as a preservative in foods and can raise tank phosphate when fed.
Pelletized food (pellets).
Check the wet analysis (not the dry analysis).
Raw protein comes from wild-caught Scandinavian whitefish.
Bulk Reef Supply, Ken's Fish, KJ Aquatics, and Super Cichlids.
Chapters
Considered that number, but yeah, for sure.
And, and you know, that question really addresses the point that some foods have a lot of phosphate in them as preservative. And so when you feed the tank, your phosphate level is going to bounce up.
I didn't know phosphate was actually preservative. I thought it was just a byproduct that was in the food.
But not, it's a, it's, well, it's everywhere, but it's a, it's, it's used as a preservative in foods and some foods have more of it than others. Generally the, the, I don't want to say higher level, but the, the, the, the better foods tend to use a little less phosphate as preservative, but it's often used in, in lots of foods. And I won't, I don't, I don't want to talk about brands or anything, but one place that you sometimes see it really drastically dramatic numbers is in some frozen foods.
Yeah. Do you. Okay, that's actually a good one. Do you prefer like pelletized food or frozen food?
Personally, I prefer pellets.
Okay.
And the reason I do is because the fish that we keep in our tanks, and this is true for the corals too, but I'm assuming you're talking about fish food when you're talking about pellets. The fish that we keep in our tank, we feed them at best two times a day or three times a day. On a coral reef, they're eating all day long. That's all they do. They look for food all day and they eat all day long. And so if we're only going to feed them two or three times a day, we need to pack as much nutrition as we can into each bite that they get. It's got to be high quality, high protein food that gives them everything they need because they're only going to eat a couple of times.
Yeah.
And so, you know, think about if you went to one meal a day, you'd have to make that meal really healthy.
Yeah.
And that's what we do to our fish in our, in our tanks. So I like pellets because if you can get the fish over to pellets, you're going to be able to pack more nutrition into each bite that they get. And they need that because they're not eating and pecking at stuff all day long like they are on a reef.
Or better yet, auto feeder and feed them multiple times more times per day.
Multiple smaller feedings. Absolutely. The best way to go, it's Also better for your corals. By the way, your corals are filter feeders. They're feeding all day long. What do we do? We come in in the morning and. And target feed them and then broadcast at night or vice versa twice a day maybe. Again, they're filter feeding all day long on a reef. So high nutrition value per unit of volume is always what you're looking for in your foods. And if you look at frozen foods, I'm not against frozen foods. Sometimes the fish really love them. But. But if you look at the nutritional content in frozen foods, they're generally nowhere near the volume per volume nutritional content of a good pellet food.
All right, you're swaying me. I feed mainly frozen, but I'm going to start going a little more on the pellet side.
Mix it up a little bit, you know, that's all you need to do. Don't leave the frozen food altogether. But if you can get those guys eating some pellets, they're going to get better nutrition. Look at the nutritional breakdown on your frozen food and then look at the nutritional breakdown on a good quality pellet. Now here's one thing about frozen foods. When you look at the nutritional breakdown, make sure that it is the wet analysis, not the dry analysis. Many of the frozen foods list extremely high protein content. Because they're talking about the dry weight. Yeah, you have to make sure that it's the wet weight on the package that they're talking about.
Good to know.
And again, just so I don't want to offend all the frozen food companies out there, I'm not against frozen foods at all. I just like to be able to also supplement with a higher nutritional value per unit of volume. Pellet.
It's okay. You've just sold me on setting the auto feeder back up to give them pellets in the afternoon. Make it so awesome.
Awesome. Yeah. I love convincing you of stuff.
Perfect. That's good though. I like it. I don't know if you want to answer this one, but in the chat they're asking, what's a good high quality pellet? What do you recommend? I don't know if you want to throw brands out, but I will throw.
A brand out and I'm full transparency. In addition to being the CEO of Tropic Marin usa, Leslie and I are also the US office for this German company. The reason we took this German company on to sell their products is because number one, they're the premier fish medication, ornamental fish medication company in the world. And number two, they, they manufacture and sell Dr. Basilier's bio fish food. And I'll tell you Devin, I did not want to sell fish food. I've known these guys that run this company for very long time because they distribute their products with Tropic Marin in Europe together. And I've known them for years. And they came to us, to Leslie and I and they, they wanted us to bring their, their products into the country, particularly their fish food. And I said I really don't want to because there's a lot of good fish foods out there, a lot of good, high quality fish foods at a really good price. Not interested in doing it. And they said no problem. We're going to send you a bunch of samples, use them in your tank and see what you think. So I used them in at that point I had the cichlid tank, 150African tank. When I saw what those fish looked like a month or two later, I was convinced and I called him up and I said, let's do it. Very high in protein. And all of the raw protein comes from wild caught Scandinavian whitefish. So it's all very clean, pristine protein. Dr. Basilier is one of the top fish biologists in the country, in the world actually. And these are his formulas. Each type of food does a little different thing.
I was going to say they have a lot, there's a lot of different types of food.
Yeah, he's a big one. He does what he calls nutricaments. And these are natural additives that all accomplish something different. And so it's good to kind of mix up the foods that you're using. I'm a huge fan of the acai because it brings out the colors in the fish. I also love the pumpkin and the lapacho. And then he's got a whole program for ick for, for stopping the ick cycle with a food called matrine. So there's, there's a lot of different foods. They all do something a little different. They're not expensive, they fall kind of in the mid range of, of what foods cost and they are super high quality. And I'm not afraid to vouch for them because if I had the pictures on my computer I could show you what my fish looked like. They looked like completely different fish two months down the road.
So question if I want to try them, where does one find them? Distributed them like are they anywhere to actually get them? And you us?
Oh yeah. There's a lot of sources online. Bulk Reef Supply has some. Ken's fish has some KJ Aquatics has some super cichlids has them.
Okay, perfect.
There's a number of different sources online for them.
Okay, I'm gonna try some, I'm gonna order some and try it.
And they're different sizes. You want to use a slightly smaller pellet than what you would normally think you should use because the, the food, the pellets are very dense, they're very hard. And you want to use one that's smaller so that it goes down the digestive tract easily of the fish. If you cut open a good sized fish that dies, you'll see that their digestive tract is really much smaller than you think it would be. So use a slightly smaller pellet one size down from whatever you're using now. And I, you take a picture of your fish and then a month down the road take another picture and compare them. The owner of the company keeps talk about fresh water for a minute, but the owner, one of the owners of the company keeps ultim angels and he showed me pictures before and after of his ultim angels and I couldn't believe the difference. So it's really, you know, I don't have, I don't have pictures on my computer, but I, I, we'll see if this will work. I don't know if this is going to work.
You said the asylum is one of your favorites. Okay.
Acai. Yeah. So let's see if you, let's see if you'll be able to see this. I don't know. Does that show up? Gets whited out. Yeah, those are awesome angels. And that's the before picture. And this fish right in the front is the dominant male. And one month after feeding acai, that fish looked like this. This is the same fish, believe it or not.
Oh yeah, that's. There was, yeah, there was like no redder color on it before.
Well, and look at the black lines. That's the key. You know, if you feed a high beta carotene food, you can get that red color. If you, if you have a tank full of yellow tangs and you feed them a high beta carotene food, they start to turn kind of orange because the, the beta carotene kind of dyes them. So you can do that red part with beta carotene, but you're not going to get those black lines to be vivid like that. The acai is what does that. There's actually a wonderful story that Dr. Basilier told me that he was collecting fish in the Amazon basin and he went to this one place and he caught some fish and they looked really vividly, much brighter than the fish that he was catching anyplace else of the same species. So he said to the guide that was taking him around, why, you know, we got to get the collectors to come here because the fish are so much prettier here. The guide said, no, you don't. You don't need to get the. The collectors here. You just need to feed them the berries. And he showed them that all around that area were acai palms that drop the berries in the water, and the fish eat the berries, and that's why the colors came out. The cool thing about the acai berry is.
