Hobby pioneer Paul “Paul B” Baldassano has some strong opinions on what types of foods are best for fish, formed over his many decades of involvement in the marine aquarium hobby. Somewhere near the top of his list is fish (or krill) oil.
From Chapter 3: Keeping Fish Healthy
Oil, in my opinion, is one of the most important things you can feed to fish. No, not Oil of Olay or olive oil, but fish or krill oil. I take it myself every day, but not too much, as I don’t want to resemble my old flounder-faced girlfriend.
In the sea, fish get a large percentage of their diet from pure fish oil. How do I know? Glad you asked. I have been scuba diving since 1970, when I did my first dive on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. I was on R&R from Vietnam, and I met a girl there who took me to this restaurant where they give you all the dive equipment and throw you in the water. All you had to do was give them any extra fish you speared.
I caught an anemic-looking lobster, and she had a belt full of fish. When we surfaced and started back to shore, I heard machine gun rounds. I knew that sound because a couple days before, I was in a war. I said (not very calmly, I am sure), “What the hell is that?” She replied, “Don’t worry, they are shooting the sharks.” Apparently, sometimes a large shark gets tangled up in this net they have around the harbor, and they shoot it. I understand that there are holes in that net large enough to allow a tractor trailer to “swim” through, and the girl I was swimming with had a belt full of bleeding fish. To this day, that was the fastest I have ever swum.
无论如何，从那以后，我一直在整个地方潜水，并在水下度过了大约200个小时。If you’ve done any real diving—the kind where you lie on the bottom by yourself until you run out of air or realize you forgot to remove your cell phone from your Speedo—you may have noticed schools of tiny fish fry, mostly near the substrate. Well, fish fry are like fast-food restaurants for most of the fish on a reef and form a large part of their daily diet. If you watch fish long enough, you will see them dip down often for a snack of fresh fish fry.
所有鱼都有肝脏。除清洁血液外，该肝脏还提供了几个功能。它还有助于浮力，但仅在大多数鱼中略有帮助。在鲨鱼中，肝脏提供所有浮力。如果没有肝脏中的油，鲨鱼将游泳以及巴黎希尔顿的狗或煤渣块。实际上，肝脏主要是油，可能是鱼重的15％，几乎是鲨鱼的20％。
So think about this: When a fish eats another whole fish, it’s getting almost 15% of its diet as pure fish oil. If a shark eats a 100-pound grouper, it’s getting about 12 pounds of oil. That’s a lot of oil!
Check out the ingredients on a package of dry food and see if there is any oil. Oil doesn’t dry very well, and boy does it stink! So my theory is that fish require a large portion of their diet as oil. It makes sense to me and to the fish.
Also consider that in pregnant fish, the eggs can be almost a third of the weight of the fish, and those eggs are mostly oil. It is a huge burden on a fish to produce those eggs, and many of the correct extra calories are needed to do so. Just imagine how much a woman would have to eat in order to have a 50-pound baby every month!
那么我们在哪里可以买到这种油？最好的地方是整条鱼，但是整个小鱼没有现场或冷冻，我不知道为什么。（向鱼类食品制造商提示：出售小冷冻鱼炸作为食物！）鱼类和磷虾油也会在胶囊中出售，如果我打算喂我的鱼片或颗粒，我总是会首先放一滴鱼油。颗粒很好地吸收了油。但是，不要将任何种类的油都放在湿食（例如冷冻食品）上，因为它只会在食物撞到水中就会洗掉。
