clownfish faveourite food!?!

[john_boy]

do you mean asinf garlic essance?

john

[reefgeek]

yep or just squeeze the juice out of a few cloves

[cdurkin100]

Originally Posted by reefgeek

yep or just squeeze the juice out of a few cloves

Garlic is not the best option, it is said it does more harm than good and I would avoid feeding it (see below as posted by wombat)

OK I'm a no garlic for marine fish person.

Why?

Well firstly let me give you a little background on where I’m coming from, I’m a fish disease research scientist and I specialize in fish vaccination and ectoparasite infections in fish. I don't work for, sell or am I in anyway assciated with commerical fish food production. My research laboratory has carried out many trials for fish feed manufactures on garlic, both as an appetite stimulator, immunostimulant and white spot “cure” and I shall link to some of this work published on UR and in the scientific literature.

So why not use garlic in marine fish diets.

1 Long term heart and liver lesions

Terrestrial plant lipids are well known to cause heart and liver lesions in marine fish. The problem with feeding terrestrial plant oils (not just garlic but any terrestrial plant oil) to reef fish is problematic due the nature of the lipids the fish do not possess the enzymes to digest them correctly and this leads to fatty deposits and serious pathological changes in the heart and liver of fish that are fed these lipids. Although these are not instantly fatal they cause chronic change to these organs and long term deterioration in the health of the fish. Granted much of this his work is done on farmed fish, but it is a well known phenomena and here are some of the research papers that detail this problem.

AH, Sargent JR, Thompson KD 1993
Terrestrial and fish oils affect phospholipid fatty acid composition, development of cardiac lesions, phospholipase activity and eicosanoid production in Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar).
Prostaglandins Leukot Essent Fatty Acids. 49(3):665-73

AH, Park MT, Sargent JR.1991.
High dietary linoleic acid affects the fatty acid compositions of individual phospholipids from tissues of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar): association with stress susceptibility and cardiac lesion.
J Nutr. 121(8):1163-72

J. Gordon Bell2, John McEvoy3, Douglas R. Tocher, Fiona McGhee, Patrick J. Campbell* and John R. Sargent 2004
Replacement of Fish Oil with Rapeseed Oil in Diets of Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) Affects Tissue Lipid Compositions and Hepatocyte Fatty Acid Metabolism
The American Society for Nutritional Sciences

J.G. Bell1, D.R. Tocher1, B.M. Farndale1, A.H. McVicar2 and J.R. Sargent1 1999
Effects of essential fatty acid-deficient diets on growth, mortality, tissue histopathology and fatty acid compositions in juvenile turbot (Scophthalmus maximus)
Journal Fish Physiology and Biochemistry 1573-5168 Volume 20, Number 3 p263-277

SL Seierstad, TT Poppe, EO Koppang, A Svindland, G 2005
Influence of dietary lipid composition on cardiac pathology in farmed Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar L
Journal of Fish Diseases.

These scientific journals detail the pathology and chronic changes due to these lipids (there are many more) but there aren’t any on reef fish, mainly as they are not a major farmed species or laboratory model, however if you apply the precautionary principal to your fish (in the same way it is applied to Humans) then you wouldn’t feed your marine fish diets containing terrestrial lipids. This has a human health comparison with Trans fats, very useful in making vegetable oils butter like so common in vegetable spreads and thought to be harmless until it turns out they cause liver tumors & heart disease in rats and mice and probably in humans too. So if this evidence is good enough to ban trans fats in foods then the much stronger data in fish should be good enough to ensure you don’t feed terrestrial oils to reef fish. As I said earlier my lab (which is a fish health research lab at a leading University) is often asked to carry out feed trials for feed manufactures and we have carried out many that use garlic or garlic extracts. Unfortunately these are considered to be commercially sensitive and I cannot tell you the results of using them to control white spot (but suffice to say the companies we have carried out scientific trials have all decided not to launched garlic supplemented feeds). However I did persuade one feed manufacturer to allow me to post the growth data from their feed trial on UR. The results were, well, damning for garlic. Here is the link to the trial from my lab in this thread
http://www.ultimatereef.net/forums/s...d.php?t=230961

Why do manufactures put it in their food? well clearly there is a demand for it and they are supplying that market demanded. It doesn’t mean it good for your fish it just means that they will sell more of their food if people are misinformed and think it is beneficial

2 Garlic’s Anti-parasitic Properties

The first question I have is please show me a research paper with proper controls where garlic has been shown to cure parasitic diseases in fish. I’ve just visited web of Science (a major research database) and there are no research papers that do this.

Much of the anti parasitic effects of garlic are attributed to Allacin and most work is done in humans, where it may have some benefits if purified allacin is fed, at around 400mg kg/bw every day. However in many mammals, (dogs, cats, horses etc) garlic causes a Heinz body anemia which is potentially fatal.

My laboratory has recently carried out a trial using purified allacin in clown fish

I recently picked up a MAEFS grant to look at this and the preliminary results are as follows The experiment was as follows

90 clown fish 40 on allicin, 40 not, 10 time zero samples. 10 sampled per week per group. The dose of allacin is 400ug/kg bw (a level used in humans and about 400ng/fish)

week 0 mean both groups 41.7% Hcrt
week 1 test 34.7% Hcrt control 42.4% Hcrt
week 2 test 18.8% Hcrt Controls 41.% Hcrt
week 3 test 17.2% Hcrt Controls 42.8% Hcrt
week 4 test 17.0% Hcrt Controls 40.6% Hcrt

Hcrt= haematocrit (how many red cells there are in the blood). The histology results on the organs hasn't been processed yet

Clearly allacin causes acute Heinz body anemia in reef fish too

To assume that all fish can eat garlic with no ill effects seems optimistic, when in mammals (which as a group are far more closely related to each other that fish are) it is fine for some e.g. the great apes, but toxic for dogs and cats (see O. Yamato, E. Kasai, T. Katsura, S. Takahashi, T. Shiota, M. Tajima, M. Yamasaki, and Y. Maede Heinz Body Hemolytic Anemia With Eccentrocytosis From Ingestion of Chinese Chive (Allium tuberosum) and Garlic (Allium sativum) in a Dog J. Am. Anim. Hosp. Assoc., January 1, 2005; 41(1): 68 - 73. (which is just one of 100's of research articles on this in the field))

Each year veterinarians have to treat 100's of cats and dogs for acute anaemia in the UK due to their owners feeding garlic to them. Simply because they read on a web it does wonders for their immune system, is anti worms etc. Yet these potentially fatal supplements are still widely available in the US/UK

http://www.pet-points.com/product_in...roducts_id=557
http://www.mysimon.com/9015-10992_8-29572306.html

3 Well Garlic must be an immunostimulant

In the most recent review if immunostimulants in marine fish

Ian Bricknell & Roy A. Dalmo 2005
The use of immunostimulants in fish larval aquaculture
Fish & Shellfish Immunology 19 (5) 457-472

Garlic is not referred to as an immunostimulant.

To be honest garlic has been discussed many time on UR, if you want to feed your fish garlic then nothing is stopping you, but I doubt you will see a benefit and the evidence strongly suggests you will do short and long term harm to them.


You would be much better with the New Era sprays than garlic IMO

[reefgeek]

cdurkin that is regarding long term garlic use hence me saying for a few days so for using for a few days to get your fish feeding is not a problem and will have no ill effects on fish

[cdurkin100]

Originally Posted by reefgeek

cdurkin that is regarding long term garlic use hence me saying for a few days

Check the posts by wombat, he is against any dose of garlic being fed to fish. When my powder blue had whitespot he advised not to dose in any form as it weakens the fishes imune system.

Why not just use the new era - no risk at all then

[reefgeek]

ok so Wombat might be against any dose of garlic but does he say anywhere that using it for a few days causes damage to fish?

[cdurkin100]

Originally Posted by reefgeek

ok so Wombat might be against any dose of garlic but does he say anywhere that using it for a few days causes damage to fish?

http://www.ultimatereef.net/forums/s...=garlic&page=2

[reefgeek]

yes I know Wombat is the "master" of fish health e.t.c e.tc but myself and others have had success with using garlic on getting fish feeding and also help threat whitespot and yes I have heard it all before that maybe it was something else that stopped the fish from dieing from whitespot but many of times I have used garlic for a few days while fish were suffering from WS and all the fish recovered and are fat and healthy to this day.
Other times when WS has broken out I haven't used garlic and guess what? the fish died

[reefgeek]

Originally Posted by cdurkin100

http://www.ultimatereef.net/forums/s...=garlic&page=2

not going to read all that now so what post number on that thread does he say using garlic for a few days causes damage?

[cdurkin100]

Originally Posted by reefgeek

yes I know Wombat is the "master" of fish health e.t.c e.tc but myself and others have had success with using garlic on getting fish feeding and also help threat whitespot and yes I have heard it all before that maybe it was something else that stopped the fish from dieing from whitespot but many of times I have used garlic for a few days while fish were suffering from WS and all the fish recovered and are fat and healthy to this day.

And thats fine and your choice that I cant argue with and Im glad it works well for you. Based on the information and references that are available and that I have looked at, I personally would not touch it.

Until they find garlic cloves growing on the reefs in a natural environment I will steer clear and I would advise others the same.