Malawi sunken belly, skinny

[a1154]

Hello. Not been here for ages!
I had a death recently of a male auratus. His belly became sunken, he did seem to be eating, not sure, but just wasted away. I notice a couple of fish have slightly sunken bellies, so I’m wondering about parasites.
Most haven’t though and look fine.
I never feed anything protein rich, they are on cichlid excel and fruit and veg. I think I’m a bit mean with the food, but I’ve never really known how much to give.
Should I feed more? Use a disease treatment (on the whole tank)?
TIA

[black ghost]

Could be several possible causes, but since you admit to not feeding them much and you’re not even sure if they were eating, I’m guessing they might be just starving to death?

Because they’re herbivores they need to have food in their gut pretty much constantly. How much do you feed? You can literally give them as much as they want, like I do, as long as it’s low in protein which your foods are. As a minimum, give them as much as they’ll eat in one minute, several times a day.

Another common cause is intestinal worms.

[a1154]

Right I’m feeling guilty now. I always thought it better to feed less. I’ll try feeding more veg etc and see how it goes. A minute is a long time with Malawi though.

[black ghost]

Fish have a feast or famine mentality. When they find food they’ll eat as much as they can because they don’t know when they’ll find more. It’s only a problem if the food is inappropriate for the species. The more appropriate food they get, the healthier and stronger they’ll be.

Mbuna are primarily herbivores, so they spend most of their time grazing, because their diet doesn’t contain much protein. You can’t get fat from eating salads.

[a1154]

My Malawi have had a nice big breakfast, and would all like to thank you BG.

[fr499y]

I used to feed Hikari Excel and the odd bit of veg. I also kept my lights on for longer to allow a natural build up of algae on the rocks