A club for owners of Parrot Cichlids

Contents

• 1 What's on the menu?
• 2 How Often Should I Feed my Parrots?
• 3 Hand Feeding
• 4 Suggested Foods

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[edit]What's on the menu?
According to the members of ParrotCichlid.com, parrots will eat just about anything other cichlids like. They have the same hunting instincts that more aggressive cichlids do, and I have seen them go into a feeding frenzy when a live bug accidentally dropped into the tank. However they are equally happy "hunting" flakes and pellets, and very easily trained to eat from your hand.
When our parrots were small, they ate small floating cichlid pellets, but now prefer large cichlid flakes, frozen bloodworms, and freeze dried tubifex worms. For a while, while we had a pleco catfish in the tank with the parrots, we would slice a zucchini in half, and microwave it for 3 minutes, then put the halves in the tank. The catfish would jump on a piece of zucchini, and start rasping away, throwing a cloud of bits into the water around him. One parrot cichlid, Gazoo, would hover just above the catfish's head, waiting for those bits. He would catch the seeds as they were loosened. Sometimes the pleco would get irritated with having this fish sitting so close by, and would snap at Gazoo, but he would just move aside for a second, then come right back for more. We got the idea for feed them zucchini from the Amazon River display tank at the Baltimore Aquarium. They throw in HUGE zucchini halves, and the big cichlids in that tank go nuts for them. One caution: be ready to clean the tank after a zucchini feast - it makes a huge mess.
Some parrot cichlid's mouths are too small to eat bigger foods, but they will eat flakes and pieces of broken-up cichlid sticks. Hand feeding sometimes helps with parrots that have trouble eating larger foods. See "Feeding Gazoo"
We feed ours O.S.I. cichlid flakes from thatfishplace.com. They sell them in 2lb bags, and in those quantities, the flakes aren't broken up much. As far as our parrots are concerned the bigger the flakes the better: they catch one and slurp it in like spaghetti.

[edit]How Often Should I Feed my Parrots?
As with other fish, it is recommended that you feed no more than they can eat in 5 minutes. The fish will appreciate twice a day feedings, although they will be fine with once a day.
We feed our 7 large parrots a big clump of flakes twice a day, and hand-feed several of them cichlid sticks. This is more than the recommended amount, and has two consequences: our parrots grow quickly, and the tank MUST be thoroughly cleaned once a week. If you are not willing to do this, stick with the lower amount of food. Parrots are messy eaters, but they are so entertaining to feed that we make a big event of meal-time, especially on the weekends when we have more time.

[edit]Hand Feeding

[edit]Suggested Foods
Some of the foods that people feed their parrots are listed below.