Why one handful of food starves the bottom
A mixed community tank is three restaurants stacked in one room of water. Hatchetfish and gouramis eat at the surface film, tetras and barbs snatch food as it drifts through the middle, and corydoras, loaches and plecos forage on the substrate — often after dark. Drop a single cloud of flake and the top two layers hold a frantic auction for all of it; by the time fragments sink, the midwater school has picked them clean, and the bottom crew inherits dust. The fish at the top grow fat and the shy fish at the bottom quietly thin out, even though the tank is technically being fed plenty. The fix is not more food — it is delivering each layer's food in a form, and at a moment, that the other layers cannot steal.
Feed in a sequence, layer by layer
Start at the top: a small pinch of floating food, spread along the surface so the surface feeders queue along it rather than mobbing one corner, and let them finish it. Next, the midwater school: a slow-sinking granule or crumbled food released into the filter flow so it hangs and drifts through their level, again only as much as disappears in a couple of minutes. Last come the bottom feeders, and their course is best served after lights-out, when the day-active fish have settled: sinking wafers, pellets or a blanched vegetable, dropped directly onto open substrate near the corys' and loaches' usual haunts. Serving the courses a few minutes apart, in the same order every day, teaches each layer when its food arrives — surface fish stop diving for wafers they have learned are not theirs.
Tools that put food in the right mouths
A feeding ring — a small floating corral — holds floating food in one patch of surface, which suits surface feeders and keeps flake out of the filter, and it gives you a fixed station to feed from. For a shy individual fish at any level, target-feed: soak a few pellets in a turkey baster or long pipette of tank water and release them right in front of that fish among the plants. Two feeding spots at opposite ends of the tank split the midwater scrum in half and are the single easiest change for a tank where a few bold barbs bully the rest. Wafers that hold together for hours suit plecos; quick-softening pellets suit corys, which mouth food off the bottom grain by grain. None of these tools costs much — the routine they enforce is the real intervention.
Checking that everyone actually ate
For the first weeks, feed with the lights on and stay to watch, because the routine only works if you verify each layer. Look for rounded bellies on the midwater school, corys actively sifting substrate after their course lands, and no wafer sitting untouched at morning — an uneaten wafer means the bottom portion is too big or landed where its intended eaters do not forage. Re-check after any stocking change, since a new bold fish can quietly rewrite who gets what. Adjust one layer at a time so you know which change worked. Setting the whole sequence — order, foods, spots, amounts per layer — into KinsLe's Care Teams lets a helper run feeding exactly as you do while you are away, with each layer's course ticked off as it is served.