Has anyone ever used vitamin and mineral blocks or shells in their tanks?
I was just wondering if they would be benificial to our Oscars health?

No, waste of time and money in my opinion, feed your fish on a really good quality food and they will get all the vitamins they need

www.hikariusa.com/products/cichlid/cichlid_staple.php

X2 with ofl

I was wondering not so much about the vitamins but the mineral aspect, and water quality. I know in some areas such as my own our tap water is filtered and chlorinated. I just wonder if some of the benificial mineral content might be removed?

Are you referring to something like this?

www.aquariumguys.com/vitaminblock.html

I do not know anyone who uses these, I haven't even seen them in my local fish store. Most of the blocks I have seen service something like 10 gallons so you will need quite a lot which makes me think that these are just one of those gimmicky things that you can get, but not many people buy

Yea that and the wonder shells that they push to add calcium to your water.

It's not something I have every used. It would be easy for someone to say you should be using them, but when you haven't had any problems in the years you have been keeping fish, is there any point in starting to use them? I think a lot depends on the fish you are keeping, some species of fish probably need to be kept in more critical water conditions than fish that come from other parts of the well. Africans for instance, because of the nature of where they come from and the water conditions that they prefer, you do have to keep a much closer at it on the water conditions. So you may benefit more from using these type of blocks in tanks that contain these type of fish that he would South American.

marcus wrote:


I try to feed him everthing I can get my hands on fresh fish,shrimp, grasshoppers and gutloaded crickets,earth worms ect. My wife says that fish eats better than we do. The only problem I've had feeding him is he won't eat a damnd pellet if his life depended on it. .So I Feed his crickets ground up Hikari Gold pellets I guess you could call it feeding him intravenously.
There's more than one way to skin a cat I mean Fish.

Waste of time and money, their is enough trace elements in tap water for oscars. Adding stuff to water is only neccessary if you are using pure water like RO water