David Gamble

Aberdeen Fishkeepers Club Chairman & Scottish Supreme Champion

Long term trial of Dragon Feeds small freshwater pellets.

I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to try out this fish food over a period of several weeks. Overall the food is an excellent food and easy to use but I do have a small misgiving. My findings and opinions are as follows.

The food size I was given was the small pellets which are said to be 0.5mm/500 microns. Generally I feel that a food of this size is small enough to feed very small fish ie the size of most livebearer fry. This is certainly not the case; anything smaller than medium size neon tetras are rather too small for the smallest pellets in the dragon feed range. The small pellet is marketed as being 0.5 mm and 500 microns in size. I am afraid I feel this is rather confusing and can lead to mistakes. 0.5 mm may very well be the diameter of these pellets but the length of even the small size can be approximately 2 mm. So 2mm x 0.5 mm certainly puts these pellets into a size bracket over the ½mm size they are marketed as. I would also have doubts about calling them 500 microns since they are ½mm x 2mm on average but that is only my opinion as I am certainly not qualified to say exactly what it should be.

Having said that I certainly did like the food. It was easy to use as it did not crumble in my fingers like some foods do. Being fairly hard dry pellets it did not stick to my fingers. I liked the fact that it did not smell bad - some foods do. It did not seem prone to attracting moisture like some flake foods do and therefore it is likely to have a longer shelf life.

My fish also seemed to like it. In fact they liked it very much. I fed it on young discus of 1"TL and they liked it and are growing well on it. I will add that as far as discus go I never feed one food only since they can be fussy eaters and I prefer to give them various food at different times. I did observe my discus taking this food from the surface! Most discus wait for food to fall down and take it mid water but my discus like the food so much they did not wait. It was amusing to see my discus going to the surface and having to turn sideways to be able to take some food into their mouths. This showed how much they liked it.

I also fed it to a tank of young angels around 1" TL. I had another tank of angels of the same size so I fed them on other foods so I could make some comparison. First of all my angels all seemed to eat well in both tanks so I could see no difference in their liking of it. Certainly they liked the food but my others liked what I gave them too. My angelfish in both tanks seemed to be growing at the same rate so I concluded that the dragon feeds pellets were as good, if not better, than the high quality food I always give my fish. The main difference I saw was that there was little or no waste with the small pellets. Unlike the other pellet sizes in the dragon feed range the small pellets remained floating for quite a long time enabling all of them to be eaten before going to waste on the floor. I did note that midwater and bottom eaters would need something else if they were present. It has to be said that most flake foods and some other pellets certainly do break up and sink a lot quicker hence giving possible pollution problems and making an unsightly mess. As regards water conditions I cannot really comment. I usually always give a weekly water change to all my tanks and am unlikely to change that so the claims of a cleaner food cannot be commented on by me.

In conclusion I am happy to recommend this food to anyone keeping 1" - 2" upper surface feeders and I personally would prefer to see the marketed size being a little more accurate to reflect the length as well as the diameter of the pellet. Because the small pellets remained at the water surface long enough to be all eaten it is a food I liked a lot. The medium pellet I also tried out but in a much smaller sample but I can certainly recommend this for fish up to around 3½" and even a little larger. This pellet does sink a little quicker so therefore is fine as long as some lower level feeders are present including Corydoras catfish.

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AquaThrive would like to point out that the accepted standard when describing extruded pellet sizes is to state the diameter of the pellet, hence the small pellet being 0.5mm or 500 microns. So for accuracy when we mention the sizes in any marketing material, the diameter of the pellet is the size that is stated.

We would also like to congratulate David on becoming the Scottish Supreme Champion at the Scottish Aquarist Festival & Scottish Supreme Championship on Sunday 23rd September 2007 and also thank him for the time he has spent compiling this report.