Am I feeding them enough?
Yes.
In all seriousness, most pond and aquarium owners feed their scaled friends more often and in larger quantities than is ideal. There are a number of reasons for this, one of which is the printed directions on fish food labels. Another is that the fish are just so darn cute. Whatever your reason happens to be, the great likelyhood is that you’re feeding too much food for your water chemistry to handle. In an ideal world, a balanced ecosystem of organisms in a vast volume of water transport and break down all of the organic pollutants like fish waste, decomposing plant/animal matter, etc. We call that ideal world the ocean and it doesn’t look much like the aquariums and ponds that most of us are familiar with. In these artificial environments we do our best to make up for the much smaller volume of water, space and biodiversity with efficient filtration, stewardship and water changes but the reality is that for the most part we fall short of nature. When we fall behind on our water change schedule the water builds up pollutants from fish waste and uneaten food. Sometimes, if the change is gradual enough and we aren’t adding new fish, everything can seem fine for some time which can encourage us to fall further behind. Given enough time the water becomes gradually more acidic until the ph is low enough to kill the beneficial bacteria that do most of the work of breaking down fish waste into less toxic substances. If that happens ammonia can build up very quickly to fatal doses. At a fundamental level this is all a fish waste disposal issue and fish waste comes from fish food.
Fish are hard to starve.
You read that right. You are very unlikely to starve your fish to death. Many can go several days without eating and suffer no noticeable ill effect. This isn’t to say that you should try to starve some fish to put it to the test. I only bring it up to illustrate how much more of a risk over feeding is compared to under feeding. Of course, with enough filtration and frequent water changes one could feed quite a lot and this actually is what is done when trying to breed several types of fish, as an example. That being said, in most cases, less is more. As a general rule I recommend one feeding each day for established tanks/ponds and one feeding every other day for new tanks/ponds. Fish should be given as much food as they can completely consume in 3 minutes. If there is food left over after 3 minutes, you’ve fed them too much. Try to scoop out uneaten food if possible. If you can follow that rule you can save yourself a lot of headache and heartache over the long haul.
Key Points:
More food means more waste
Fish are well adapted to intermittent feeding
Water change schedule is the limiting factor
