Understanding Predator Fish and Thiaminase

Predator fish is defined as a fish that kills and eats another organism,

common prey would be fish, crustaceans, insects, worms, and so on.

Apart from hunting, occasionally they scavage for dead organism as

food sources. Predatory fish are mostly carnivorous.

They have a big stomach and short intestine designed to process protein as their

main source of energy. Feeding true carnivorous fish with pellets is wrong as you

will notice they poo most of the pellets before they even had the chance to digest

any of the nutrients. It is like feeding pellets to tigers, actually, cats do poorly with

pellets too unlike dogs that are omnivorous by design.

The typical way we keep predatory fish is feeding them with gold fish and prawns,

any type of prawns. Now the problem with this is that most available feeders

Lampan, Gold fish, Carp, Seluang in fact all the family of fish under the Cyprinind

Species has very high enzyme known as Thiaminase enzyme. For some reasons,

carnivorous fish doesn't do well with Thiaminase enzyme.

What is Thiaminase?

Thiaminase is an enzyme, a chemical compound that destroys or inactivates

Thiamine.Thiamine is an important vitamin also known as Vitamin B1. There is not

just one type of Thiaminase, but several different ones, some of which can be

produced by bacteria, fungi, plants and potentially animals.

The lack of Vitamin B1 in humans is called beriberi.

In recent years scientist has a better understanding of high Thiaminase diets

effect. Consistent result from zoos, salmon farms and various other large

predatory fish farm.

High Thiaminase diets symptoms generally result in stunted and poor growth.

Loss of appetite, abdominal swelling and hemorrhage, loss of equilibrium,

convulsions, muscle atrophy and a weak immune system.

In the aquarium setting, we kept seeing the results of poor growth or stunted

growth and sudden death when kept in a high thiaminase diet. Unfortunately,

prawns are an important diet to bring out the color of fish and should not be

avoided entirely. Feeding pellets to carnivorous fish is also not the best way as

they can't process and absorb nutrients from pellets.

Hence vitamin B1 supplement is the best way to counter the effect of Thiaminase

poisoning to ensure our predatory fish grow to its potential massive size.

Comments

The science behind Channa Marulioides colors and pattern

Channa Marulioides is the chameleon of the fish, they are the champion when comes to color changing abilities. In a split second they can change from greenish brown to yellow and to orange. They can change their eye color from black to bright red. Observe your Channa Marulioides and you can see they greet you with bright yellow colors doing the maru dance, they flashes their bands to the highest contrast. The body colors are intense and their eyes bright vampire red in colors. When they are tone down and just swim about their business you notice the color is dull when they are in mid water, and suddenly sinking to the bottom with bright orange (depending on the var and PH) they keep changing and flashing their bands and patterns. But the black and white flowers will remain so in whichever mood they display. Also take note that maru shows their best colors mostly at midnight. Each Channa Marulioides comes in its own unique pattern of bands and flowers, like a fingerprint, I beli...

Marulioides Care Part 1 (Bunga)

I've been reluctant to write this but many had asked me to post how to take care of marulioides for maximum performance. The truth is you need to abused it, hence Marulioides care isn't exactly the correct terms to use. Channa Marulioides is found in most part of malaysia, lakes, pond, streams, rivers, but one thing most fisherman realized are those caught in swamp, I mean really dead stagnant peat swamp. Waters that are near black in color most time the fish had tremendous performance, beautiful colors and a lot of flowers. From this theory many tried replicating the conditions with low ph and so on. I've experiment many ways of keeping marulioides and I can concur to this, Low PH meaning Ph5 and below, I usually keeps mine ard PH4 or maybe lower, because my test kit can only measure till 4 and cant read anything lower. Low PH produce beautiful coloration. As for the bunga, yes everybody wants to know this, there is no tricks, just lots and lots of experiment. It i...

Malaysia Golden Arowana Challenge

This project was back in 2014, Kitty Lai wanted to know if I still have it to groom Arowana fish. So I picked a so so XB which I bid only for RM400. Its not a fish which you will find appetizing, the fish has slight PLJ, crossed barbel, very thin/translucent gold. unformed pearlies Very transluscent gold crossed barbel Pictures above are what the seller sent me Fished Arrived First Day fish in my tank First fixed was having the barbel cut and take note of the slight PLJ PLJ - Protruding Lower Jaw 2 weeks later in the dark tank, gold become more intense and I needed to pump the fish up to reduce the PLJ effect. Tanning project begins and when I went to find for tanning lights only did I realized how long it had been since I left the Arowana scene. TFC factory had closed down, for your information TFC T8 light is one of the best tanning light for arowana. I asked all the shop and they say everyone is using LED tanning l...

FISHIOLOGY

Search This Blog