Size a kuhli loach meal by the night, not the day. Once the tank lights are out, place a modest portion — a few sinking micro pellets, a section of crumbled wafer, or a small pinch of bloodworms for a typical group — directly beside the driftwood, leaf litter, or dense planting where your kuhlis spend the day. They will emerge, snake over the substrate, and work through it within the hour. Morning inspection tells you the truth about the amount: a clean feeding spot means you judged it well, while slimy leftovers mean the portion shrinks.
Daytime food is food for other fish
Kuhlis are nocturnal bottom dwellers that spend bright hours hidden, sometimes half-buried in sand or tangled in plant roots. A keeper who feeds the tank at noon and adds "a bit extra for the loaches" is feeding the mid-water fish twice. The loaches' meal has to be its own event, timed to their activity and placed at their address. This is why so many kuhlis stay thin in busy community tanks despite generous total feeding — the amount was fine and the timing made it irrelevant.
Place it like you mean it
Kuhlis find food by smell and by those sensitive whiskers, sifting mouthfuls of substrate as they go. Food dropped beside their cover is found within minutes of darkness; food dropped at the far end of the tank may never be found before it softens into the gravel. Use the same spot each night and the group will gather there expectantly. Soft sand suits this sifting best, and a smooth feeding area free of sharp gravel keeps their barbels and bellies undamaged while they eat.
How much, across a group
Kuhlis are social and should be kept in groups, and a group of six or so needs surprisingly little in one place — think a wafer broken into pieces spread over a hand's width of substrate, rather than one large lump one fish can guard. Frozen bloodworms or daphnia on some nights, in the same modest total, match their natural diet of tiny invertebrates and keep condition on slimmer individuals. A well-fed kuhli looks like a smooth, rounded eel; a sharp-backed, hollow look across the group means the night portion grows a little or moves closer to their hide.
The morning-after evidence
Night feeding fails silently: food the loaches never found decays out of sight and shows up as creeping waste readings and a mulm layer in the quiet corners. Check the feeding spot each morning for a week whenever you change the amount, and siphon there during water changes. If the group suddenly stops emerging at night, or individuals look pinched despite food being placed correctly, water quality is the first suspect and an aquatic vet the second if things do not recover.
Late feeds are the ones households most often skip or double up, so putting the kuhli portion in KinsLe's Care Teams as an after-dark task, marked off when it goes in, keeps these shy fish reliably fed.