Best food for Oscars

what is a good food for oscars to eat? Also what is a good treat for them?

 

Oscars will practically eat anything....so there is lots of choice.

I feed mine on a basic diet of Hikari pellets, but he also gets a fair amount of bloodworm that I feed to the other fish in the tank.
They do like insects (spiders/moths) but I would be carefully feeding them such things as they may have been contaminated with any number harmful chemicals. I have fed them earthworms but again be mindful of contaminates.
Ocasionally I do give him feeder fish but again you have to be careful that they are not diseased or sick.
Beef heart is a good treat for them as it contains very little fat which fish have a hard time digesting.
To be honest there is so much you can feed them, but I prefer to stick to healthy, reliable sources.........and maybe a prawn or two if he has been good

(watching him strutt around the tank with a prawn sticking out of his mouth makes me LOL, reminds me so much of a dog with a bone!)

 

I actually wrote an article on oscar care for another site but I'm waiting for it to get posted. In the mean time, here's a little excerpt from it.

Diet - The absolute best food for oscars is good quality pellets. They are specifically designed to meet all of the oscar's nutritional needs. Some of the most commonly recommended ones are Hikari (Staple, Gold, and Biogold), HBH (Oscar Show & Oscar Grow), New Life Spectrum, and Omega One.

Treats - Even though pellets meet their nutritional needs, oscars appreciate a bit of variety in their diet. There are many treats that can be fed to oscars including crickets, earth worms, red worms, meal worms, krill/shrimp, snails, beefheart (but no other mammal or poultry meat), and some will even eat veggies like peas, spinach, and lettuce. Most pet stores will sell crickets, earth worms, meal worms, and red worms for fairly cheap. Although most people have a nice array of insects available in their backyards, giving them to fish can be risky because they could have come in contact with pesticides which are poisonous to fish. Also, mammal and poultry meat contains a lot of unsaturated fat which fish cannot digest due to their low body temperature. The fat gets stored in the liver and can eventually kill the fish. Beefheart is an exception because it contains almost no fat.

Feeder fish - Generally, feeder fish are a bad idea. Most of the ones that can be purchased at the store are kept in really horrible conditions. They are very unhealthy and highly likely to introduce diseases into your tank. Even if they look healthy, there's no guarantee that they actually are. The ONLY way it would possibly be okay to use store bought feeders is if you quarantined them for at least 2 weeks. To get around using store bought feeders, you could breed them yourself. However, you would have to keep them in just as good conditions as you would any other fish. You can't overstock them, you have to feed them a good diet, and you have to keep their tank clean. Otherwise they would be no better than store bought feeders. Considering all of that, in most cases it isn't practical to use feeders at all; especially considering all the other safer, cheaper alternatives. But if you did use them, they should only be a very occasional treat and NEVER the staple part of the diet.

-Chelle