Switching foods

Has anybody heard of feeding different foods causing bloat or any disease. I feed my nasuta only veggie foods. But I change up from pellets to flake from feeding to feeding. Feed twice a day. Different brands of each. All with less than a 39% protein percentage. They are all excellent quality. All the other fish are doing great. But every once in a while I lose one. We are talking months apart. They are growing great. My
wild caught Pulchers are breeding like maniacs in the tank. I recently read on line that switching foods to quickly may cause this. Just wondering if any one else has experienced this. I never have before but I never had this many Herbivores before. Also the Tropheus in my other tank on the same diet are having no issues at all.
It is a 220 gal
PH 8.2
Ammonia 0
Nitrites 0
Nitrates 3
40 % water changes at least once every 2 weeks
FX6
1200 gph large wet dry

12 Opth. Nasuta Mukosa
6 small Alto calvus
2 small Petricolas
2 breeding WC daffodil Pulchers ( breeding)

Not sure I've got a ton of mbuna and I rotate foods. Never lost any to bloat, check for other underlying symptoms.
Also check for foods expiration or how it is stored. If your hands are **** when you reach in to feed the fish you could cause mold or bacterial growth etc etc etc


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If I understand correctly, you are only losing feather fins. Are they dying because of bloat? My experience with bloat has always involved multiple fish contracting it and having to treat them. Have you had to do that?

Without knowing the above, it sounds like you're losing fish to an alternative cause. My experience with Feather fins, which are aggressive towards their own not others in the tank, are kind of sensitive of other fish aggression. Your breeding pulchers will defend their spawns to no end. They could be stressing out the feather fins.


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I had a problem like this in my Saulosi tank. I would lose a random fish every month or two, due to bloat. I switched foods but nothing changed. I determined that there must be a parasite in the tank, so I put all the fish in a quarantine tank and treated with metro. Then I completely bleached and cleaned the main tank. I restarted after 2 weeks in the quarantine tank, and everything is normal.

I try to keep my vegetarians eating below 36% protien food... Nls or xtreme although I picked up some fluval veg pellets on clearance for $3 and they are mixed in some times .... Never had any problems with bloat with the higher quality foods


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thanks for the advise. I have tried to treat the fish but to no avail. I have not lost that many fish to bloat but I have only save two using epsom salts and metronidazole The pulchers are very aggressive in defending broods but the calvus and cats still manage to get them. I also had 2 other pulchers in that tank but they were on opposite sides of the tank with the breeders in the middle. It may be a parasite but I have never seen it only attack one species so intermittently. I am pulling all of the pulchers this week end and treating the one fish that is not eating in a separate tank. I don't have a quarantine tank to put them all in right now and I really don't want to treat the 220. Any other advise would be appreciated. I have had a lot of Africans in my day but this is the first time for this for me.

So it sounds like it's the pulchers your losing? The other, and very often unrecognized, cause of bloat is aggression, suggested in your case by losing a single individual every so often, which is typical when aggression is the cause. N. pulcher are tricky to keep in groups. They live in groups in the wild, but in a tank, the dynamics are complicated by the limits of the tank and, being an aggressive fish in the first place, things can sometimes get ugly for conspecifics. It's one of those sometimes it works, sometimes not so much deals keeping these guys in groups, depending on specifics of the tank, individuals in the group, etc.

I have moved all the Pulchers to there own tanks and so far everyone is doing great. I have 10 Nasuta left and two of the males are coloring up at about 3". The Pulchers have their own tanks and are spawning.