Reply To: feeding baby’s

Liquifry is a thick white liquid that comes in a dropper-bottle. From reading the labels/bottles, it contains dextrin, pea flour, whole egg, and yeast.

I found that if I hold the bottle just a mm or two above the water line when creating the drops, the drops will momentarily stay at the surface, and then once the surface tension has been broken, diffuse into millions of small little drops which spread around the tank. If you drop it from a height, the liquifry stays as a single drop which sinks to the bottom of the tank and tends to stay there for a while. I suspect the former approach is better. The tank water goes cloudy for a few hours as the nutrients go all over the tank.

The fry at first are FAR too small to observe whether or not they’re actually eating these droplets, but I guess they are.

The other thing that the label claims is that these nutrients will cause other microbes to grow (called “infusoria”), which the baby fish also eat. (Again, you can’t observe it because, well, they’re microscopic!). I -have- noticed that a few weeks after using Nutrifry, I now see (in the mornings when I first switch on the lamp), tiny little white worms crawling over the glass of the tank. I believe these are planaria, which again, the fish are supposed to like eating. Apparently planaria exist pretty much wherever you have fish and you probably already have some in your tank. The liquifry helps them multiply, and then become fish-food.

The label suggests that you should start putting liqui-fry into your tank BEFORE you have fry (as soon as you see eggs, it says, but with the CPD’s, you’re probably NOT going to see eggs). This is presumably so that the microbes are already thriving by the time the fry need them. I didn’t do that, but I suspect that if you see your fish making “spawning dances”, then a little liquifry might not hurt anything and get the tank ready for when you DO have fry.