>The recipe was one of two in Australian Native Fishes for Aquariums by Ray
>Leggett and John Merrick. One recipe had a higher concentration of protein
>- I made the other one
>prawns, liver, spinach, potato flakes, fish flesh, gelatine and calcium
>ascorbate.
Mixture (B) in Ray Leggett's book is a recipe I gave to Ray for his book and
was one I was making at the time - I no longer use that recipe! (Not that
there is anything wrong with it) However, I was adding the Calcium ascorbate
which is a Vitamin C, Calcium combination because I was having a problem
with some Glossolepis maculosus. They were showing the typical "lordosis"
symptoms and general wasting disease and I though that the vitamin C and
calcium combination would improve the situation. Unfortunately, it didn't
and eventually I destroyed all my stock of G.maculosus. Also if you feed
your fish calcium supplements you will also need to include Vit. C as the
calcium needs the Vit. C to be utilitised by the fish? Incidentally, the
Mixture (A) in Ray's book is a recipe that use to be made by the Qld Cichlid
Group for feeding Cichlids.
These days I use 2k prawns (with heads & tails removed but with the body
shell intact), 1k NZ whitebait, 1k mussels, 500 - 1000 g Spinach, 500g beef
liver (blanched in hot water to seal in blood). All this is blended in a
food processor and set with gelatine. You can add a few other things like
fish roe etc. I use to get a freezed dried food that was all insects, but
its no longer available. This was good as it contained a lot of "chiton"
(insect skins?) which is part of their natural diet. However, I think the
prawn shells do the same job?
>I still don't know if kidney would be acceptable as a substitute for liver
>or what a spawning mat is. Don't any of you have any ideas?
As for kidney, I wouldn't worry about it if you have already made the food
but next time I would use liver. The reason is as per my earlier post!
Spawning mats are probably an artifical spawning medium such as mops?
BTW - I would be interested in what you used for "Potato Flakes"?
Regards,
Adrian.
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Adrian R. Tappin
atappin at ecn.net.au
http://www.ecn.net.au/~atappin/home.htm
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