Can you feed your south American cichlids grasshoppers and crickets or will they introduce disease?

Answer 1

Oscars are big messy always hungry fish. They should have a high protein diet of about 75% meat type items and about 25% vegetable matter. As a base food go with a good quality pellet. They will survive on this though they'll thrive with fresh or frozen foods of a wide variety. I recommend against feeding live feeder fish because you'll eventually introduce disease into your aquarium. You can feed shrimp, frozen non-oily fish (for Freshwater Fish I recommend a salt water fish and visa versa), earthworms, insects, squid, beef or turkey heart, par boiled pork liver, etc. For vegetable matter my fish love peas though I also feed zuchini, spirulina algae, sea weed either fresh from the Asian markets or dried from any sushi section of the grocery, peeled brocholi stems, romain lettuce, spinach, completely boiled carrots, etc.