The best aquarium fish food

This is the pick on composition, and the composition is unusual enough to explain. The first ingredient is dried black soldier fly larvae, and Fluval states the food contains up to 40% of it.

Why that matters is not marketing. Most tropical community fish eat invertebrates in the wild rather than processed grain, so an insect-based protein is closer to what the animal is built to digest than a formula led by cereal. It also lands at 46% crude protein with the lowest fiber figure of the three picks at 1.5% maximum and a stated ash maximum of 7%, which is well below the Hikari pick.

Fluval also states no artificial fillers, colors or preservatives, and that is a genuine point of difference here rather than a slogan — one of the other picks on this page lists two artificial colors in its own ingredient panel.

The honest costs. It smells strongly of insect meal, and some people mind that a great deal. It is sold both as granules and as flakes, and the two are not interchangeable for very small mouths, so check which form you are ordering — a granule sized for an adult community fish is simply too big for a nano species. And like every dry food, what is not eaten within a couple of minutes becomes waste rather than nutrition.

This is the food most beginners already own, usually as the sample sachet in a starter kit, and it deserves a fair hearing rather than dismissal. It is a competent staple.

The published analysis puts it level with the Fluval pick on protein at 46% minimum and noticeably higher on fat at 11% minimum. Higher fat is not automatically better or worse — it is more energy per flake, which suits active fish and makes overfeeding easier to do. The ingredient panel is led by fish meal, then dried yeast, ground brown rice, shrimp meal and wheat gluten.

Flake is the easiest format for a beginner to feed correctly, and that is a real advantage. It floats, so you can watch every piece being eaten and stop when the fish stop, which is exactly the feedback loop that prevents overfeeding. Sinking foods hide the evidence in the substrate.

The honest costs. Flake goes soggy quickly once wet and then sinks, so anything not eaten in a couple of minutes is waste. The ground brown rice and wheat gluten fairly high in the ingredient list are cereal fillers, which is the specific thing the Fluval pick avoids. And the tub is sized for far more fish than a first tank holds — an opened tub does not stay fresh indefinitely, so buy the smallest one you can.

The reason to buy this one is physical rather than nutritional: pellet size and sinking behavior. Hikari sells it for bettas, tetras, barbs and other small-mouthed tropical fish, and it is semi-floating — it sits at the surface briefly and then sinks slowly.

That combination solves a specific and common problem. A tank with surface feeders and mid-water or bottom-dwelling fish cannot be fed properly with a floating flake alone, because the fast fish at the top clear it before anything reaches the rest. A slowly sinking pellet feeds every level of the tank on one feeding.

Hikari also states a micro-coating that locks in the nutritional components and reduces the chance of water clouding, which is a real practical benefit — some pellets shed a visible cloud of fines the moment they hit the water, and those fines are pure waste load.

The honest costs, and there are more here than on the other two. At 43% minimum protein it is the lowest of the three, with the highest fiber maximum at 7% and by far the highest ash maximum at 17%. More importantly, Hikari's own published ingredient list includes the artificial colors red 3 and yellow 5. Those are there to make the pellets look appealing to the buyer, not to feed the fish. If that matters to you, the Fluval pick states it uses no artificial colors at all.

The skip entry, and it is a skip in a specific sense: this is a perfectly good product being bought for the wrong job. Beginners buy bloodworms because the fish visibly go mad for them, and enthusiasm at feeding time is easy to mistake for nutrition.

The objection is not ours. It is printed on the packaging. Tetra directs that its Bloodworms be fed in conjunction with a primary food such as TetraMin, and retailer feeding guidance across brands is commonly two to three feeds a week alongside a staple diet. No maker sells freeze-dried bloodworms as a complete diet, and none of them publishes the kind of complete guaranteed analysis the three picks above do — because it is a single-ingredient supplement rather than a formulated food.

Fed as the main food it is an unbalanced diet. A fish that will eat bloodworms enthusiastically and its staple food reluctantly is a fish that has learned there is something better coming, which is a training problem you created, and it makes it harder to feed the animal properly for the rest of its life.

Used as intended, it is genuinely useful: a couple of feeds a week, an easy way to condition a fish that is underweight, and the one thing a fussy betta will almost always take. Buy it second, after a staple, and feed only what is eaten within a minute or two.