Feeding Live
 

Thought I would pick Canreef's brain on a discussion that I was having with Jdigital. Is it appropriate or ethical to feed live food to animals in your possession? For example:

Feeding harlequin shrimp live starfish
Feeding large preds (Groupers, Triggers, Puffers...) live fish/ live inverts
Feeding Mantis Shrimp live fish/ inverts

Any insight would be appreciated.
Levi
(Looks like my Poll didn't work :sad:Oh well, should make for a good discussion though)

Eat or be eaten!

i think it's fine. that's what happens in nature.
also if you really went down to the knitty gritty, your always feeding live to your animals. copepods eat algae and detritus, fish eat copepods, fish eat fish, ect.

That is kind of how the food chain works. I personally think it is better to feed your critters live foods. I equate the processed foods to TV dinners, they will fill the void but that is about all they are good for.

Why should our tanks be any different than what happens in the ocean? I used to feed my pythons live baby mice. I used to feed my tarantula live crickets. I have dropped live lobsters into pots of boiling water. I think it would be hypocritical on my part to have a problem feeding live food to my tank inhabitants. Just because it is a cute little clown doesn't make it less ethical to feed then other fish. A living creature is a living creature.

+1
I love watching my Tarantula eat live mice/ crickets. Throwing in freeze dried just isn't the same :neutral:.

zoaElite, our conversation was quite a bit more focused regarding this topic. And my "beef" wasn't the topic of 'live food' usage. I am upset at the reasoning Elite used for tossing 2 perfectly healthy clowns into a Mantis tank. You can damn well bet, that if those clowns hadn't been harassing other fish the LFS wouldn't have had a "reason" to toss them in the tank.

as i've said before, hat mantis will only accept live fish. if it wasn't them it would have been some other fish. mantises have to eat too.

Well hopefully you can afford clownfish as food when you take Grendal home.

Would you prefer that the fish be sold to some unsuspecting customer only to have it kill all of there fish? Atleast this way there was a reason behind feeding him live.
Levi