Cichlids are tropical fish living in the tropical rivers and lakes in Africa and central and south America. In virtue of the beautiful appearance and bright colors, cichlids own great ornamental value, which have been introduced around the world. No matter as a professional breeder or as an amateur tropical fish lover, it’s necessary to know how to feed cichlid properly.

Feeding cichlid in aquarium, you need to notice several important tips, including water temperature, water quality requirement, feeding food, lighting control and disease prevention, etc. In order to make the aquarium breeding work successful from the start, FANWAY plans “golden rules” to eliminate the uncertain factors or accidental success from luck, which is a kind of natural rules ensuring to cultivate cichlids successfully. The rules, in other words, are to make fish and aquatic plant won healthy and vivacious life, and make the aquarium play its role.

Sand and Water Temperature in the Aquarium

Laying heating line at the bottom of aquarium can compel the heated water to ascend, thus making sand become a part of chemical and physical systems in the whole aquarium. With this heating system, temperature will evenly disperse to the aquarium, meanwhile the nutritive salt generated from sand can also flow along with water to leaf segment of water plants. And vice versa, when water flows into bottom sand, oxygen gas will enter bottom sand along with water flow, so sand can keep longer action time and avoid the substrate to darken. Besides, adopting 24V low voltage, this heating system is pretty safe for human and fish and can be used to imitate the horizontal and vertical natural flow of ground water in tropics.



Stable Water Quality

As we know, in tropical waters, the water quality of fast flowing water is always stable and some water quality factors, like PH value, carbon dioxide content and hardness, rarely change. So in the aquarium, you need to adjust the PH value to neutral and hold acidity steady, that’s to say, the carbonate hardness is at least 3-4 degrees DH. Neutral PH value is controlled by carbon dioxide addition, but this control should maintain the carbonate hardness at 3-4 degrees DH at any rate so as to guarantee necessary stability.

Fish Feeding in accordance with Cichlids

Only fish feed with high quality, high in vitamins and easy to digest can feed healthy and lively cichlids. Please note that the salt content of fish feed pellets must be very low because cichlids usually come from water area without salt. Otherwise, it’s very easy for cichlids to feel ill by suffering from intestinal diseases. By the way, the process of water quality is equally important as fish feed, so it’s necessary to deal with the water quality effectively when changing the water, reducing the harm from water quality.



To be specific, you need to figure out what species your cichlids belong to because it determines which food to feed your fish. Generally speaking, most cichlids are more starving in the morning because they are through whole night without eating food, and you’d better feed them according to their stomach rumblings. The first-rank feeding time is twice per day, feeding what your cichlids can eat before sinking to the bottom of aquarium, and your fish will grow faster than once per day feeding. For grown cichlids, the occasionally fasting is advisable, like one day per week, which assists in regulating the metabolism. Please watch out for overfeeding your cichilds because too much fish feed would raise the nitrate levels and cause water quality issues when food sinking to the bottom of aquarium. FANWAY strongly recommends you to control the amount of food cichlids eat within thirty seconds because cichlid fish are greedy and able to consume a good deal of fish feed at short notice.

Tips: if you produce fish feed by yourself, please take notice of fish feed formulation and fish feed extruder you are using!

Suitable Lighting Intensity

According to the size and shape of aquarium, lighting control can use fluorescent tube, finsen lamp or metal halid lamp. Just using any of these light sources, it’s able to maintain natural colors of fish and good growth of aquatic plants, while its primary goal is to ensure the aquarium has appropriate amount of oxygen supply in daytime. It’s not enough for fish feeding aquarium with only 100% saturated dissolved oxygen because not only cichlids need oxygen, even the bacterium also need oxygen to make decomposition of wastes (the wastes come from fish bait, water plants and the like). Moreover, water plants also require a certain content of oxygen especially at dusk. Therefore, for fear that oxygen is not enough in night, you need to complement the oxygen in daytime by using the suitable lighting.

Disease Prevention

As the aquatic creature, it’s troublesome and difficult for cichlids to get treatment after illness, neither easy to inject medicine nor oral drugs, so it’s generally regarded that stress should be put on the prevention of cichlids disease. At the same time, Fanway suggests several tips during the process of prevention and treatment combination, achieving the disease prevention and earlier treatment for illness. First, strengthen the health status and disease resistance ability of cichlids themselves in normal management. In addition, pay attention to reduce and completely eradicate the harm to cichlids caused by pathogenic microorganism and parasite.