Platies can definitely eat brine shrimp. Not only is brine shrimp a healthy food for your fish, they are a tasty treat that your pet platies will love.
Platies are omnivorous fish and they need a food source that provides enough proteins to keep them in perfect health.
However, brine shrimp should be offered in the most suitable way to support your pet fish’s health. Keep on reading to learn how to feed brine shrimp to your platies.
Can Platies Eat Brine Shrimp?
Platies can eat brine shrimp, whether it’s offered frozen, freeze-dried, or live. However, live food can carry parasites and bacteria, so it might not be the best option to feed your platies.
Nevertheless, to minimize the risk of diseases, you can prepare cultured food at home. Cultured food is more challenging to prepare at home, but you can guarantee that your fish are always healthy. Freshly hatched live brine shrimp will provide your platies with the essential nutrients.
Should You Offer Freeze-Dried or Frozen Brine Shrimp to your Platies?
Frozen food is easy to offer to your platies, but frozen brine shrimp contains fewer nutrients. As a result, it shouldn’t be the primary food source that you offer your fish.
For best results, you should combine frozen brine shrimp with other food types and nutrients to keep your platies in excellent health.
Freeze-dried foods are more nutrient-rich than frozen foods and will be a good alternative if you can’t find reliable live brine shrimp. The drying process kills the bacteria and parasites in live food, so freeze-dried food is an excellent food to offer to your pet fish.
What is the Best Food for Your Platies?
Platies need a balanced diet made of proteins and a few fibers to keep the fish healthy and allow them to grow healthily. You need to mix and match various food types to cover the fish’s nutritional needs. Here are the best food types to offer your platies.
High-Quality Flakes
Do your research to choose a high-quality type of tropical fish flakes for your platies. Make sure that the ingredients list contains enough proteins to satisfy the fish’s needs.
Freeze-Dried Foods
Freeze-dried foods provide the fish with the needed proteins, and can be used as a supplement to the flakes. In addition to brine shrimp, you can feed your platies freeze-dried blackworms and bloodworms.
Frozen Foods
Frozen foods are accessible, but they don’t provide your platies with all the proteins they need. As a result, they should be used occasionally, and only when other types of food aren’t available.
Live Foods
Although live foods are what the platies can find in their natural habitat, they might make your pet fish extremely sick. Unless you pick the live foods from a reliable source, they can be packed with harmful parasites and bacteria that might eventually kill them.
If you want to feed your platies live foods, it would be a good idea to culture the food at home. This way, you can guarantee its cleanliness.
Egg Yolk
Egg yolk is a protein-rich food that you can offer to your platies. It’s also one of the most affordable and easiest to prepare food types that you can prepare at home. If you have baby fish, egg yolk will be one of the best options you can offer to help your platies grow.
All you have to do is crush the yolk of hard-boiled eggs and feed the small portions to your platies. However, egg yolk soils the water quickly, so you shouldn’t add too much of it to the aquarium.
Beef Heart
Beef heart isn’t always the easiest food to obtain, but it’s rich in the proteins that the platies need. You can either blend the beef heart in the blender and prepare frozen cubes for your fish or make sure that it has a rather rough texture and offer it as a paste.
Vegetable Pellets
Platies don’t feed on meat solely, so they also need to eat some fibers to stay healthy. Your fish will occasionally feed on the aquatic plants in the tank if you don’t offer enough fibers. This is why you need to supplement their diet with some high-quality vegetable pellets.
The fish prefer to feed on planktons and different algae, so these should be listed as ingredients in the vegetable pellets you pick.
Vegetables
Fresh vegetables can also work for your platies because they need the fibers, minerals, and vitamins to develop their colors and fight off any infections. You can offer your platies fresh vegetables after blending them, or you can boil them and blend them to prepare a paste.
You can also freeze the paste and put the frozen vegetables in the aquarium. This will guarantee that the pieces are small enough for the platies to swallow.
Cucumber, squash, lettuce, and zucchini can be offered and prepared to feed your platies as supplementary food. You can prepare your homemade vegetable pellets by drying vegetable paste in the oven.
How Long Can Platies Go Without Food?
Adult platies need to eat once per day, while younger fish need two or three meals per day. However, the portions should be naturally smaller, so you don’t overfeed them.
If you can’t provide your platies with their daily meals, these hardy fish can still survive for a while. Platies can last for a few days without being fed, as long as you prepare them for this situation.
You should do a 50% water change before you leave the house to get rid of all the toxins that might be accumulating in the tank. You should also remove any decaying plant matter, sick fish, or uneaten food residue, and clean the filters to make sure that they will function properly.
Platies can last for up to two weeks without being fed, but this will only happen when the fish are extremely healthy and always well-fed. In most cases, your adult platies will last less than two weeks. If you have baby fish, they will only last for about three days.
Wrap Up
Platies can definitely eat brine shrimp, whether it’s offered live, freeze-dried, or frozen. You can also offer other types of food including commercial flakes, vegetable pellets, and a variety of homemade protein-rich foods.