What can your bettas eat?
Bettas are carnivores in nature and feeds on many different types of worms and insects so their diet consists of high protein foods. There are specific foods designed for fancy bettas that will be good enough for your wild bettas. That is… if they are willing to eat it.
Wild caught bettas are used to eating live foods, such as worms, insects, daphnia, shrimp and even smaller fishes. Worms can be as small as microworms and as big as nightcrawlers depending on the size of your fish. Insects such as fruit flies or small crickets can also be fed to your fishes. I sometimes catch that one annoying house fly and feed that to them as well. That is rather satisfying. Mosquito larvae works as well if you find some in a bucket of water out back that you forgot to empty.
Live foods are the best to feed your wild bettas when you first receive them as they may be stressed from the travel and their new environment and will most likely eat something they are familiar with. This is also great for when you want to condition them for breeding.
Betta Unimaculata fry attempting to eat blackworms for the first time.
Once your fishes get used to you feeding them, then you can start introducing frozen and dry foods. Keep an eye on them during this process as you may need to remove any uneaten foods after awhile before they pollute the water. If they do not eat, you can try again at another time. Some bettas may eat them right away and some may take a lot longer to get used to it.
Once they know you give them food, they'll be more likely to take anything you toss in. You can also try moving it around a little to resemble something live. If you're usually feeding worms with tweezers, you can try some pellets or flakes with the tweezers as they may have associated that with food
We feed our fishes a variety of blackworms, baby brine shrimp, frozen bloodworms and a variety of betta pellets(as we’re doing some testing - stay tuned). Some are still learning to eat dry foods but we usually don’t have them long enough to train them all to eat dry foods before they are off to their new homes.
1 comment
Do you know where i can buy (not Amazon) live tubifex worms to feed my fish?