We were amazed when we first saw a snowflake pellet expand in our tank. We hadn’t been keeping shrimp long and received it as a sample from an online shrimp food retailer in the U.K. We decided to give it a try and as it swelled up, at first we were a little worried that something was wrong.
Quickly we saw our shrimps were not perturbed at all, they got excited and started flocking to the flakes with glee, so we relaxed and assumed it was all part of the plan.
It wasn’t till later that we got chance to research these interesting snowflake pellets and find out why they expand and swell up like they do.
So what makes the snowflake pellets expand in water?
At first we were concerned about some sort of man-made additive designed to put on a show, we prefer to feed our shrimp natural foods as much as possible. The truth is this effect is entirely natural and just a result of how snowflake pellets are made.
Imagine the fibrous shell of a bean, once it’s been removed and dried you have a thin almost transparent flake of highly structured vegetable matter. Now imagine dozens of these shells (or husks) being compressed together driving moisture out and bonding them together into a tight little pellet. This is what we have in snowflake shrimp food. It’s not a powdery mix made into a tablet, it’s a stack of little layers crammed in very tight.
So it’s not so surprising that when a pellet like this is soaked in water, those many little layers swell up and start to regain some shape and plumpness. With so many tiny flakes doing this at once it creates that pleasing little eruption of shrimp food that interested us so much on that first day when we tried one out.
Not only is this flaking fun to watch, it also spreads the food out into an excellent surface area allowing space for many shrimps to nibble and surfaces for mycelial growth which adds to the banquet for the shrimp.
We hope you’ve enjoyed finding out a little more about snowflake shrimp food. For further information, check out our page with information about snowflake shrimp food.