Re: Color enhancing fish food

San Diego Joe wrote:
Haven't been here for a while. Notice the din has died a tad.

Does anyone have any factual information or a first hand opinion about
"color enhancing" fish foods? Does it actually make those reds brighter?
Will it bring back a color that has faded? I am, of course, completely
skeptical. Plus, they are very much more expensive than the standard food.

I love feeding color enhancing foods. They usually contain a lot of carotenoid pigments and/or algae. Fish must obtain carotenoids from their food - they cannot synthesize the pigments themselves, although they can interconvert them. Carotenoids produce the green-yellow, yellow, orange, and red colors, and they're mostly synthesized by plants and algae. The more pigment you feed your fish, the more it can store and the brighter the color gets. Carotenoids commonly occurring in freshwater fish include beta-carotene, lutein, taraxanthin, astaxanthin, tunaxanthin, alpha-, beta-doradexanthins, and zeaxanthin.

I used to feed color food to my African cichlids and I had amazing, yellow-orange N. leleupis. I brought some into a store to sell, the fish manager was amazed. I also recently switched to TetraMin color flakes from the regular TetraMin. My gold white clouds went from pale gold to a rich, orangey gold. My koi angelfish also went from yellow to orange and developed more areas of color. I've always used color pellets for my goldfish, and the little sarassa comets I bought recently have turned from orange to a much deeper red on the color food.

A commercial example of color feeding is salmon flesh. Wild salmon have bright pink flesh from eating shellfish which are rich in astaxanthin (a carotenoid). The shellfish get it from eating algae, which produce the pigment. Farmed salmon must be colorfed to get the flesh looking pink the way people expect. Flamingos are also pink from eating astaxanthin-containing algaes.

I think you would be very happy with the results of a color food in restoring color to your faded fish.

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