There are many various and diversified types of live food available to feed fish and coral reef tank inhabitants. Copepods, Amphipods, and Mysid cultures are now available to the public and home aquarist for feeding saltwater aquarium fish, corals, and other marine animals like seahorses, cuttlefish, and even squid. Marine Aquaculture Nurseries are beginning to make these live, nutritional fish foods available to the general public. In the past, these types of live food were only available to large commercial scale aquaculture facilities, University or laboratory institutions.
There are many benefits to feeding live food to the saltwater aquarium tank.
When fish ingest live food they get the entire nutritional profile contained in a live organism as opposed to non - live frozen or processed foods.
Some of these elements present in live food are live enzymes.
Also contained in the stomach of the live prey item is the partially digested food that the organism ate prior to being eaten by the larger fish or coral.
As an example:
When we think of an animal like a seahorse or fish, we can classify them as carnivorous. It has been proven that these carnivores also need the nutritional benefits of plant matter but they don’t have the ability to digest plant material like single celled algae phytoplankton. The way they receive this plant matter is by eating zooplankton like Copepods, Amphipods and Mysid which have partially digested algae in their stomach.
These are some of the reasons why it’s important in maintaining a reef tank to supplement non - live feedings with live fish food like Copepods and Mysid etc.
When you feed live fish food copepods to your reef tank, the pods stay alive and can reproduce in your tank. If you provide the right environment they can establish a breeding colony and grow alongside the fish and corals that eat them.
Maintaining a carnivores like a seahorse, squid, or fish on a strict diet of non- live meaty foods, eventually the animal will become nutritionally deficient and not live a healthy life in the home aquarium. So it is important to supplement a marine animals’ diet with live Copepods and other live prey items such as Amphipods, Rotifers, Baby Brine Shrimp, Mysid shrimp etc. on a regular basis.
Live Micro agae, Marine Phytoplankton like Phytopreme Live is composed of unicellular saltwater algae. Products like these live cultures are available from companies like Aquaculture Nursery Farms. Animals like Maxima Clams, Feather Dusters, and many corals, inverts, and filter feeders need to be fed live phytoplankton.