Ding Gui fish has a wide range of food and is an omnivorous fish. I like to eat rotifers, cladocera, copepods, green algae, aquatic insects larvae, water worms, plankton, benthic organisms, attached algae, and I can also cultivate feed fish such as crucian carp and bream. Artificial culture needs protein feed, and fish meal, soybean meal, rapeseed meal, cotton meal, secondary flour and bran are used to prepare feed.

Ding Gui fish is a very valuable fish species with yellowish or dark brown back. It is also an important ornamental fish. Its meat is fresh and tender, with high nutritional value, and it is loved by consumers. Now it is widely cultivated by farmers.

Ding Gui fish is a kind of freshwater and benthic fish with wide temperature, and likes to live in still water where there are many aquatic plants and muddy sediments. They like to live in fish ponds, ponds, reservoirs, rivers, lakes and other waters where aquatic plants are sheltered, fed and dissolved with oxygen. Because it has respiratory function when it is in hypoxia, it has strong adaptability to the change of oxygen content in water.

Ding Gui fish can live in water that carp and crucian carp can't tolerate, and can survive in water at 0℃ ~ 40℃, and the optimum growth temperature is 20℃ ~ 28℃. The pH value is 7 ~10. Resistant to low dissolved oxygen, the skin has respiratory function, strong cold resistance, and often moves at night. In winter, it can crawl into the mud bottom in the north and hibernate in the mud.