Holidays are supposed to be relaxing getaways, but not if you’re fretting about your fish. Here’s how to avoid stress on your break.
WORDS: NATHAN HILL
PREPARATION, PREPARATION, PREPARATION. Whether it’s two weeks in the sun, or skiing in the alps, the last thing you want is to be panicking about an aquarium a thousand miles away. But simple preparation will put your mind at ease.
Feeding
This is the one thing that fishkeepers worry about the most—how to ensure adequate feeding while you’re away. Basically, you have four options: fasting, holiday food, automatic holiday feeders, or a fish sitter. Which you choose will largely depend on how long you’re away for.
Fasting is the easiest option. Pending the fish you have, you might be able to get away with just a few days, or perhaps a week or two—for constantly grazing fish, like pipefish or Indostomus, it might be a stretch to leave them for even a long weekend, while a big piscivore might only feed once a week anyway.
For the typical community, around five days without food isn’t going to hurt unless you already have undernourished, skinny fish. If everything is plump, healthy and happy, five days is safe. Just avoid the temptation to feed the fish more than usual in the run up to leaving—this will only increase the pollution risk in the tank.
Holiday food varies wildly in quality and capability, and will even behave differently in different conditions. The white holiday blocks, for example, are designed to slowly dissolve and release pellets of food as they do. However, experience has shown that they can dissolve rapidly in very soft water, or barely at all in very hard water. If using a block, it’s worth trying one out many, many weeks in advance to see how it behaves over a week or two. If it burns out in two days, it’ll be no good, and likewise if it doesn’t budge for a fortnight!
Other options include gel-based foods like those from Tetra. These are exhausted as the fish graze on them, so lifespan will depend on your fish’s gluttony. These foods tend to have a relatively low protein level, so they sustain fish without running the risk of polluting.
Automatic feeders are something I have a love/hate relationship with.
When they work well, they work really well, but when they work poorly, they don’t really work at all.
The idea behind an automated feeder is that you pre-fill a large chamber (
