Variety is half the battle
Food variety for your fish
their main food supplemented by a different food from time to time. You can choose from various other ranges to complement their species foods: JBL PRONOVO COLOR FLAKES M was developed to intensify the colours even more in a natural way. Healthy green food is available to your fish with JBL PRONOVO SPIRULINA FLAKES M .
Frozen food
Every food, including frozen food, provides some welcome dietary variety for our fish! Just make sure that the feed animal size fits the mouth size of your aquarium fish. Large red blood worms would be completely unsuitable for neons. There are conflicting opinions about thawing before feeding and whether to pour away the thaw water. We recommend thawing in a fine landing net and throwing away the thaw water, as it contains enormous amounts of harmful substances such as phosphates. By the way, you can introduce some types of parasites and bacteria through frozen food. The freezing process does not kill everything!
Live food
This form of feeding is certainly the most natural, in part because it also encourages the hunting instinct of your fish. The same applies as with frozen food: the size of the feed animals should fit the mouth size! But beware: if you were to theoretically feed live food EVERY day, the nutrition of your aquarium inhabitants would still not be ideal. This is because one type of live food does NOT provide a varied diet! Think of live food as a treat for your fish and vary the type of live food. Just for comparison: One type of dry food like JBL PRONOVO BEL FLAKES M contains over 50 different raw ingredients. How many types of live food are available to your fish in real terms?
Treats and functional food - what is for what?
Of course, you can feed your aquarium fish healthily and completely exclusively with the appropriate staple food. But your fish are also happy to have some variety. All fish will then reward their keepers with vibrant colours and health.
You can supplement the food spectrum very sensibly with green food ( JBL Spirulina ), for example. This is not only healthy, it also provides the fish with spirulina algae, which are extremely popular with almost all fish species.
In order to intensify the colours of your fish in a natural way, the JBL research department has developed a colour food in which natural carotene (astaxanthin) from krill (deep-sea shrimps) leads to an enhancement of the colours.
Furthermore, there is a selection of treats available for your fish
Among the treats, your fish will look forward to red blood worms ( JBL PRONOVO FIL ), TUBIFEX ( JBL PRONOVO FEX ), brine shrimps ( JBL PRONOVO ARTEMIO ), water fleas ( JBL PRONOVO DAPH ) or healthy insects ( JBL PRONOVO INSECT STICK S . You don't have to have all types of food at home at once, but every creature is happy to have a change of menu now and then.
There are only a few fish species that do not eat insects and/or shrimps in their natural habitat! Only some highly specialised fish species, such as scale eaters in freshwater from Lake Tanganyika (Plecodus straelini) or coral polyp eaters in seawater (many butterfly fish/Chaetodontidae) do not eat insects or shrimps.
However, if you offer it to them in the aquarium, they often accept this food. All other fish species eat insects (e.g. insect larvae in algal turf) and/or shrimps directly or indirectly. For many fish, this is even included in the name of their diet and they are called "insectivores". The famous archerfish (Toxotes), which spits insects off leaves, is perhaps the best known example!
JBL has therefore taken insects into account to a much greater extent in the food compositions of the JBL PRONOVO range, but of course only if the fish target group has insects in its food spectrum. Mixing insects into EVERY fish food because it’s a trend makes no sense! JBL PRONOVO INSECT is now available specifically to feed insects to your fish!
It’s easy to understand why we should not process large bugs as insect fish food. The chitin content of the shells would be far too high! Mealworms would be easy to obtain - but contain too much fat.
The search for the "ideal" insect has led to black soldier flies (Hermetia illucens, abbreviated = BSF), but as larvae. Larvae have 12 times the nutritional value of adults and a consistent composition. Soldier flies are bred on a large scale and do not have to be taken out of their habitat.
Since the larvae feed on animal and vegetable protein, their composition is perfect for fish. The protein of the larvae is characterised by a high vitamin concentration, a high biological value (amino acids) and very good digestibility.
JBL PLANKTON PUR
This natural food is very special: it consists of pure arctic zoo plankton, which is kept without preservatives by a special temperature process. PlanktonPur is available in 2 sizes: Size S with miniplankton for fish from 2-6 cm and size M for fish from 4-14 cm. It is freshly sealed in oblong mini-sticks and can thus be conveniently fed in portions.
On the JBL expeditions, ALL fish in the wild ate PlanktonPur immediately, even though they had never been offered food from a "fresh stick" before. It counts as a great success, because many fish species in their natural habitats only accept foreign food after a certain acclimatisation period.
Homemade live food
Catching live food such as water fleas in the wild has become complicated over time: In many countries it is forbidden for nature conservation reasons and many waters are unfortunately no longer clean. Fortunately, there are brine shrimp eggs! These eggs can be stored dry and the small crustaceans (nauplii) only hatch when the eggs are placed in salt water. JBL has developed a set ( JBL ArtemioSet ) that makes cultivating Artemia crustaceans child's play.
This way your fish, and not only the young fish, get a fresh and extremely nutritious live food. It is also interesting to note that brine shrimps have their highest nutritional value directly after hatching, as their yolk sac in particular contains many important nutrients!
