After paying handling charges and shipping long distances, I'm not sure that fish food purchased on-line is necessarily cheaper than your locally available tetramine. Please do investigate them though.

I would also check and see if there are a couple of tetramine foods and other brands locally available. They, or another company, may market a specific guppy food. Also look for a vegetable or spirulina flake. Maybe while traveling, look in the phone book where you are staying for local tropical fish shops. :)

Some aquarists contend that there is a problem with declining fertility if a fish is just fed one kind of flakes.

Real tubifex worms come from nasty, polluted waters. I don't think I would suggest to a friend that they go into those disease containing waters collecting. Cleaning and purging those worms is a terrific amount of work too.

People feed guppies a little canned or cooked spinach. The guppies take most of it, but don't feed too much because the spinach can make the tank quite acid.

I have crushed the insides of cooked peas (we cook vegetables with no butter or other greasy item) and fed them to the guppies. They are taken enthusiastically. Cooked or canned peas are relatively high in vegetable protein. Either I snack on the pea shells, feed them to the dog who sees me eating them and therefore wants them ;) or if we are raising snails such as the apple snails - they get the pea shells.

The Japanese and others use Nori leaves (I believe it is a seaweed product) in cooking and wrapping food items. Reputedly koi enthusiasts feed it to their koi.

It may be that you have a soft vegetable, maybe especially a legume, which your fish could eat. If it is cheap, accepted, does not pollute the water and has some protein, it could be very useful.

I would stay away from most lettuce types - with many it takes more energy to process and digest than the fish can get from the lettuce. Do a search of marine aquarium sites for details if you are curious.

I spent a little time (not as much as I would have liked) doing www.google.com and scirus.com searches. Turkey is much more diverse than I realized or probably still understand. You even have salt lakes there and maybe brine shrimp eggs.

There are killifish living in inland lakes which freeze so solid large trucks can roll across them. That is not my image of Mediterranean Turkey.

If you search you will also find mention of small crustacians or cladocerans other than brine shrimp. There are some Daphnia (actually there are many species and genus worldwide) cyclops and others from Anatolia (is that an appropriate name for the peninsula?) and nearby regions.

If you have some cool space or a basement where you live, vermiculture or earthworm culture might be possible. It is messy cutting them up though and if you have hot summers it probably is not worth your time bothering with earth worms, white worms, grindal worms or microworms. Those last three are bite sized for certain fishes and guppies.

If you do a google search under vermiculture or the specific popular names you will find many references on raising those worms. Scientific searches should yield up information using the scientific species names.

I would bet that in your bigger cities there might be an aquarist association. Also, the scientific searches should mention Turkish rsearchers who have worked or are working with such creatures (brine shrimp, cladocerans, or worms).

If they are like the few university people I have encountered, they are short on time and money. Sometimes though, they can help you.