Floating vs Sinking Fish Feed Pellets, Which One to choose?

Aquaculture is the fastest-growing food production industry in the world over the past few years. Approximately 50% of all fish consumed by humans comes from aquaculture. As the industry matures, understanding the requirements and production of fish feed is critical to the growth and sustainability of aquaculture.

When fish are kept in high-density indoor systems or confined to cages and are not free to feed on natural foods or where natural foods are lacking or contribute little to nutrition. Nutrition plays a critical role in improving fish productivity. Farmers should use nutritionally complete feeds. Feed is the biggest cost of intensive fish farming. The feed can be produced by steam processing to produce compacted, pressurized pellet (sinking) feed; or by extrusion to produce an expanded floating or buoyant feed.

 Floating Fish Feed

Types of fish feeds

Floating feed - This feed floats on the water surface. In general, floating fish feeds offer many advantages over sinking feeds.

Sinking feeds - Sinking feeds are solid feed pellets that are submerged during application. They are more economical.

Which one is better? Floating or sinking fish feed pellets

Generally, there is no difference in nutrition between floating and sinking feeds. Whether you use floating or sinking pellet feeds depends mainly on what species of fish you are keeping.

Floating fish feed pellets

Floating fish feed pellets are usually used for larger groundfish, food fish, and parent fish. Floating on the surface (usually remaining intact in the water for several hours), the fish must surface to eat. This allows you to easily observe feeding rates in order to monitor the health of your fish.

Farmers can observe their fish daily, which helps monitor their health and vitality. They can also adjust the amount of feed on a daily basis to avoid wasted feed and pond pollution problems.

 Floating Fish Feed

Our Floating fish feed Production Line can produce fish feed with high precision. The size, shape, and moisture content of the products meet your requirements.

Such as starch, meat, fish and shrimp, etc. Quality animal food must be healthy, tasty, and attractive to the animal and its owner. Our extrusion solutions cover everything from raw materials to packaging, significantly reducing production costs and achieving the desired stable quality.

Sinking fish feed pellets

However, for ornamental fish such as goldfish and koi, sinking fish feed pellets are more suitable for them. Because goldfish are voracious pets and will usually rush to their food, grabbing the pellets in the commotion, they will eventually inhale the air into their stomachs as they gulp down their meals. What you can usually observe is that the air bubbles get trapped in their fecal discharge and prolonged conditions are sometimes blamed for the flipping disease that occurs on goldfish. Therefore, your goldfish should only use sinking food pellets.

 Floating Fish Feed

Bottom-feeding shrimp prefer sinking pellets (denser than water density, 1 g/cm3) and will not accept floating feed. Farmers can estimate the feeding rate based on their pond's growth and determine if it is too low or too high than what is actually needed.

Although there is still some debate, floating feeds are still preferred in some cases. And although more expensive. If you want to reduce the cost of fish feed, you can try a mix of feeds, such as 15% floating feeds and 85% sinking feeds.

The source is from here.