Feeding Medakas
Feeding medakas is fairly simple, they eat most commercially available fish food, while they’ll eat anything, condition, health and colouration have to be taken into account.
They much prefer feeding at the top layer, the formation of thier mouth is designed to feed mostly from the top of the water column and the babies are much more effective skim feeding at the surface.
The medakas mouth is not massive and the body is not really designed for tearing food so a food designed to be fully consumed at once is preferred which means for adults is a 0.5-0.8mm floating high protein comprehensive food and for babies 80 micron to 200micron sized high protein food.
The best commercially available food for adults would be Hikari Fancy Guppy and for babies would be Hikari First Bites, but a comprehensive multipart food is better. I myself have a selection of different foods, for fry and babies: Otohime fry, Sera Micron, (multiblog ebay) high protein fry dust, Mikron fry dust. Adults are fed, Bioscape insectivore tropical granules, grinded to 0.2-0.8mm, (frenzyfishfeeds ebay) 0.5mm frenzy tropical high protein pellets, Saki Hikari Marine Herbivore M sinking, grinded to 0.2-0.8mm.
All of the above combination of dry food gives a broad amount of high (fish) protein and vegetable protein for growing fish and putting on condition and form for adults.
Live food is also important, I mostly stick to easily cultured and reproducable live foods. I culture daphnia for babies and adults, bloodworms produced from naturally available midges, cultured ostracods from my own culture jars, and infurosia culture in a 30litre tank.
Commercial flakes are fine, but I recommend them as a ‘part’ of a complete diet and crushed to 0.2-0.8mm. Once you see the condition a high protein pellet you’ll find it much easier to feed them floating pellets to size, especially portioning for amounts of fish, pellets are much easer to portion correctly and leads to less waste.
Green water is a VERY big part of a medakas diet plan, outdoors they sift through the accumulated green algae build up at the bottom, also the free floating algae and the resuting micro and macro water insect food that builds up from consuming the green water is an even bigger part of thier diet. Even the algae itself is a vital vegetable protein.
Live treats like brine shrimp and black worms go down well. Many medaka are known as ‘lazy’ hunters when thier bellies are full, so keeping a live supply of blackworms or daphnia in containers with a large green water supply for thier consumption often is an easy unlimited way of supplying live food to them, of course the numbers and amount of live food consumed when the green water is exhausted or the live food is hunted to exhaustion.
As above I always keep a constant supply of full adult sized daphnia in my newborn and growing out tubs, the adult daphnia add a constant supply of eggs and newly hatched daphnia for the babies to eat 100-200micron sized, food perfect for babies. Also when the babies have grown big enough to eat full adult daphnia is a sign they can probably go from exclusively infusoria, fry dust, daphnia diet, to some of the adult 0.2-0.5mm foods.
As said initially, they’ll eat any food, but colour, body tone and size and condition are all influenced by the diet as they grow. Having a comprensive and varied diet makes sure they have the best start and best conditioning for breeding and keeping.
