For many years I’ve been using Elos SVM feed in my marine aquarium, but I never did an article, but it’s one of the feed I always recommend, and it’s time to do it properly.
This article is also available in: italiano.
As I always repeat, granular food is produced at lower temperatures then other feeds, except for pellet ones, and this makes it one of the best feeds you can use in aquarium. Infact it’s less polluting then frozen feeds, and it doesn’t receive the problem of the cold chain, but keeps its nutrition, that otherwise go lost with the high temperatures treatments used for other feeds (you can find more details here).
Elos SVM has the classic red coloration with havily irregular grains. It’s made of fish wheat, marine zooplancton and squid wheat, plus gluten wheat, fish solubles, yeast, fish oil and yeast products like the Saccharomyces cereviasae. Then vitamins, betaglucand, astaxanthin (we explained in this article why astaxanthin is important, in italian) are added. We’ll see in detail next. Elos cares to underline that the food is prepared with marine fish products and not frozen ones.
Elos SVM is a complete food for fish that aren’t strictly algae eaters. In that case you should consider to administer even fresh or freezed-dried, on specific feeds for algae eaters.
Elos SVM feed remains easily on the surface, at least if put in the food ring, but when is touched by a fish, or the surface is moving, it falls quite rapidly, sign that’s a heavy food, rich.
The jar is in plastic, differently from the others in aluminium, has the safety cap and inside there’s the sealed bag with the food. The spoon is no longer in the dotation, unfortunately.
The presentation video
This is our presentation of video of Elos SVM. It’s in italian but you can add the subtitles.
Composition of Elos SVM
The feed results to be made by:
- Fish wheat;
- marine zooplankton wheat;
- squid wheat;
- fish solubles;
- gluten wheat;
- dry yeast;
- fish oil;
- yeast product (Saccharomyces cereviasae).
As usual is very interesting the nutritional analysis, and the proteins form the main part:
- Raw protein: 62%;
- Raw oils and fats: 11%;
- Raw cellulose: 0,8%;
- Ashes: 9,5%
- Sodium: 0,8%
- Calcium: 1,9%
- Phosphorus: 1,6%
- Other: 12,48%
The same analysis is reported in the following chart:
As we can see from the chart, the feed for the main part is composed by proteins (62%) and it has 11% of fats. For this reason it’s part of the caloric foods, perfect for fish that eat other fish or crustaceans and are tireless swimmers. The proteins are more than the average of similar feeds (51%), as well as the fats (9,9%), the fibers are fewer than usual, 0,8 against 1,6. The remaining part are ashes and something we have no indication of. These elements bring the amount of fill materials to 22%, a lot lower that the average of 34%. I also have to make you notice that Elos declares that in the feed are sodium, calcium and phosphorous, and we’ve only seen it in the feeds of Equo and XAqua, in part even if in Hikari‘s and Aquaforest‘s. The values of these elements are in the average.
The vitamins
Now let’s see the analytic composition of vitamins, trace elements and additives:
- vitamin A: 6000 UI;
- vitamin D3: 1125 UI;
- ferric oxide: 942 mg;
- manganous sulphate monohydrate 46,2 mg;
- ferric sulphaye monohydrate 121 mg;
- zinc suplphate 246 mg;
- potassium iodide 2,6 mg
And here are the corresponding charts:
In the first chart there’s the comparison among vitamins, and differently from the usual there’re only vitamin A and D3, both present in lower quantities compared to the average of other feeds.
The vitamin A promotes and healthy grow, strengthens the eyesight, protects the skin and has a positive action on fecundity. When we consider the minerals, we can see that the iron is widely present both in form of ferric oxide, and on form of ferric sulphate monohydrate. After that the zinc is the second most present mineral. There’s some astaxanthin, even if in small quantities.
Notice the red coloration of the feed. And also the amalgam of the pellets! (zoom 1:1 with macro lens of 150 mm on a full frame camera)
Experience
As I said, I used the the feed for a long time now, and some my favourite fish lived 10 years and I almost exclusively used this feed.
The cost of the feed
The 60 grams jar costs 12,87 euro and the 500 grams jar costs 59 euro. So it’s 21,45 cents per gram, that decreases to 11,8 per for the bigger jar, that obviously is much more convenient.
For a comparison: Hikari Marine A costs 8,3 cents per gram, and the smaller Hikari Marine S 11,2 cents per gram. Then we have 10,4 cents per gram for New Life Spectrum, 11,3 for XAqua Marine, 21 for Equo Menu Marino, 15,6 for Unica Gran Premium Plus, 12,3 of AquaForest Marine Mix S and 14,2 for Vitalis Marine Pellet.
For a deepening on fish feeds we leave you to the following article. It’ has a few years now, but it’s still actual: fish feeding.
