One note, pound for pound frozen is cheaper, but frozen is mostly water. Dehydrate your frozen food down to the amount found in a pellet and you have a lot less food. Although I've never seen a fire eel on a pellet in person.
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Yeah, that's probably true, but it is still a good staple, ime, as long as it's supplemented with other foods. And I don't recall which member it was, but there was someone on here who said their fire eel was on pellets. I know from experience that M. armatus can be trained to accept pellets, but I guess fire eels could be more stubborn.
There are lots of threads about huge spiny eels, but people post more threads ( and these get more attention ) about specially big fish than about normal or small sized fish.
By the way, the OP asked about minimum captive size and not maximum captive size.
When did the OP say anything about a "minimum captive size?" You don't base future tank setups on the "minimum captive size" of the fish you plan to keep. If you were doing that, you could theoretically keep a senegal bichir in a 10 gallon, an endlicheri or even an oscar in a 40 gallon, etc. I would say, unless your fire eel dies a tragic early death or something, it can definitely be expected to reach at least 36" in time. Regarding your claim that people post more threads about large eels, that may have some truth to it, but people post threads about their eels of all sizes, ranging from juvies up to 40" monsters, yet somehow the eels in the 28-32" category are rarely over 3 years old. Funny how that works.