In the bone chilling cold of the January of 2026, one wintry morning on Facebook, user Angel Skalare in 2026 demonstrated his paste food formulation which given below. Paste food for fish seems to have originated in the west around the time of Innes' first book, written around 1890 and published 1910 and has gone from Innes' oatmeal with some dried fish meal in it, to Gordons formula, a liver paste after WWII to Jack Wattley's salmon, beef heart and spinach recipe in the 1990s. This new recipe from Angel Skalare represents a new breadth in the formulation of in house made paste fishfood.

So these are some comments or what I'd do with is as some suggestions for refinements to an otherwise already very very good recipe. They occur in no particular order. 1) Astaxanthin the various classes of antioxidants Astaxanthin is good, but it's only one of dozens if not hundreds of a phytochemicals (chemicals from plants) that are antioxidants. These come in two forms as a rough metric the blue ones and the other ones. We'd go broke buying all of thyme as powder and the cheapest and best source of these ae two fruit - rosehips, that contain massive amounts of all the non-blue antioxidants, and chokecherry, which contains massive amounts of the blue/other family of antioxidants; along with the paprika powder these are a superb arsenal of antioxidants. I'd simply use ground rosehips and ground chokecherry, steeps in a little hot water to soften them up, that just add this. As fart as I can tell this is the most you can get of all of them for the least money. Beet powder is also pretty potent a itd easily obtained these days. As an aside it's the perfect food to feed live foods such as daphnia, white worms, brine shrimp and fruit flies.

Adding the pet vitamins is good, but its probably a lot cheaper to just use drug store vitamins for the water soluble ones: mostly the b-vitamins or which there are a dozen. B100 pills from the store have them in an good strong amounts.

The "multi" vitamins tend to be a homeopathic dose. B100 have 100 milligrams (or micrograms) of each one, and sari about 5-10x more potent than the multi-stuff. One thing I would add as well is finely grated Brazil nuts both for their tropical oils and protein but mostly for the selenium which in the past few years has seen intensive research of it's antiviral properties, had a significant role in the clearing of Ebola in 2014 and that little Covid incident in 2019-2023. Besides that it seems to be the missing element where there is reproductive failure, too much or too little and results may be poor. This is especially prominent in killifish, which are found in areas of good selenium and some species (Raddaella) will not really reproduce without it, explaining why they are able to be bred in the selenium rich waters of Germany and Holland but almost never in the Americas even thought the physics metrics (pH, hardness etc.) are the same. This is also why there is an unwritten rules that if you keep killies you have to give them bloodworms for them to be healthy. Nobody knows why, when asks but we all do it. What if I told you bloodworms are the only selenium containing fish food? I had found that unless Fp. sjostedti has bloodworms then fertility will be poor, on the order of 2%. With bloodworms it's more like 75-85%. Soo, Selenium is very important for resistance to disease - fungus, bacteria and viruses are all affected and to enable proper modalities od preproduction. Per 2023 Summana, the recommended Se dose in fish feed falls between 0.1 and 2.00 mg/kg. The final reason to add selenium to fish food is, it boosts antioxidant activity. One paper points out that while tea from Astragalus membranaceus treats calcium oxalate in the body - preventing and removing kidney stones, that this works better with astragalus that is high in selenium: selenium boosts antioxidant activity synergistically with those polysaccharides: polysaccharides, flavonoids, and saponins, which reduce oxidative stress, inhibit crystal adhesion, and modulate inflammation.

The addiction of salmon oil is good, krill oil or seal oil are better if you can get it. The other oil soluble vitamins, E, A and D can be addressed by adding some what germ oil and cod liver tinned in its own oil. Amazon - may be where the fish are from but Icelandic cod liver oil is what they need in captivity to replace the traces of exotic phytochemicals in pollen they ingest in the gut of their food animals in thew wild. These contain the minerals, vitamins and amino acids that can make a new (plant) life, but also also these potent chemicals are the raw materials for the brightly colored pigments so many of our finny charges are sought for. This may at least in part, explain why fish raised outdoors have better colors. Sunlight no doubt plays a part but the contribution of bugs full of pollen is absolutely not to be underestimated.

This is all pretty standard stuff and other than the selenium, could be a mid 20th century recipe. So lets catch it up to the 21st century. There's a killifish - Nothobranchius furzeri that stands out among all other killfish. Like all Nothobranchius it lays its eggs in the mud where they rest for weeks or months, they hatch out, spawn dry out and sno on. But what's different about N. furzeri is that they adults only live a fedw months. While other species of Nothos can live upo to three years - that is none of them art particularly short livged, this one is; there are two strains, one lives five months and the other lives 3 months and there's nothing you can do about it, they're litersally programmed to die. Tyrone Genage reports that in one 6test he worked on they were able to extendc the lifespan of N. furzeri by 50%. Consideing this is the standard aniumal model to agiing reseasrch and given that this is the firdst time anybody has ever bveen able to prolong the lifspan of thjios species, I'd say oit was a big deal. 50% masy not be much for a fish thst lives five months, but for s fish thst lives ten yeasrs it's rasther significsant. Perhaps a killi that lives three years can live to be five Who knows; - tests on this are all over the place with results, although tGenad3 told me a lot of folks were doing these tests wrong which might explain it. At ajny rate results may indeed vary as this seems to be a functionb of diet. One paper poihnts out reservetrol didn't do much on a high sugar low fat diet, but it did work with ahigh fst lowe sigar diet. Sadly, sweet as it is, sugar - the more we learn about it the more we find sugadr is not your friend AT ALL. (Lustig). Starcheds are of course concentrated sugars, that is starches break diown inbto sugars so with this in mind it might be time ti rethjink the peas in this recupe ans instead, use a mix os parweely and cilantri; both supply all the leafy greens and their inherent nutriens, parsleybeing parti - most drug and health stores have "reservetrol" tablets which some people take as a supplement. Early on it was reported that it kills cancer in the lab, but was found to be too weak to work in animals. But, later work showed it prevented telomere damage and (are you sitting down?) extended the life of model organisms, a worm and fruit flies, x and y times normal lifespan respectively. So what the hey, throw some of that stuff in there too. The results from tests so far, which are pretty interesting I think:

Table 1.0

1. Yeast (S. cerevisiae): Studies have shown lifespan increases of up to 70%.
2. Worms (C. elegans): Typical extensions range from 10% to 18%, though some specific trials have reported higher median increases under particular dietary conditions.
3. Fruit Flies (D. melanogaster): Standard resveratrol supplementation often shows marginal or no effect (around 5% or less), though specific studies using specialized formulations like "resveratrol rice" have reported increases up to 41%.
4. Turquoise Killifish (N. furzeri): As a short-lived vertebrate, it has shown highly sensitive responses, with median lifespan extensions of 33% to 56% depending on the dosage. Honey Bees (A. mellifera): Extensions of 33% to 38% have been recorded. (shout out to killi-scientist Tyrone Genade for being part of this research!)