When you’ve been keeping reef tanks for a decade or more than are a number of good practices that become so ingrained and second nature that we naturally take them for granted. Sometimes we don’t even realize we’re doing something out of the ordinary until someone else points it out.
One of these common habits is the practice of rinsing frozen foods, especially Piscine Energetics frozen mysis shrimp. Also known as PE Mysis, this food is one of the unrivaled ‘superfoods’ for saltwater aquariums but that high density nutrition does come with a caveat.
PE Mysis来自的高纬度湖刺激这些甲壳类动物生产许多脂质，脂肪和油，它们与虾一起包装。如果您有一个巨大的礁石水箱，养分较低，鱼类和大量的珊瑚，那么一定要继续前进，将立方体扔进水箱中。但是，如果您有一个平均正常大小的礁石坦克真的should be rinsing PE Mysis before feeding it.
I generally do this in two cycles, using a tall jar with an inner lip to catch shrimp while skimming off the thawed water. In the first thaw you can easily see both how cloudy the water is, and how much fatty oil builds up at the surface. Doing just one rinse should remove about 75% of the loose oils but I like to do a second rinse just to make sure most of the free fats will be removed.
These are gentle rinses that don’t affect the nutritional quality of the shrimp themselves, but significantly reduce how much raw oil goes into the tank and aquarium water. Without rinsing a feeding of PE Mysis shrimp you might collapse your protein skimmer foam for several hours, but with a rinse, you can shorten this period to 30 minutes or less.
If you’ve got a lot of fish and are heavy handed with the frozen foods, your reef tank will thank you for getting the loose oils out before feeding PE Mysis to your reef. So many aquarists just skip this step and cause all kinds of nutrient, cloudiness and algae problems in their reef tank. PE Mysis is unrivaled in its nutrition for marine fish but don’t go adding unnecessary nutrients to your reef water just because you don’t take a couple minutes to rinse this frozen treat.
