Fire eel with white blotches
- Thread starter Irecruitfish
- Start date
Blood worms lack nutrition needed by large growing fish such as fire eel, as mentioned above.
Fire eels can be trained to accept other foods, such fish fillet, frozen shrimp and such, but it takes time, one of the best methods is hand feed them earthworms for a period of time, till they associate your hand with food, then you can replace its regular fare with fish fillet or with shrimp.
It takes time, but can be done, once they start accpeting these foods, you will notice a much faster growth and a bulkier eel.
Can order them via internet. Believe some bait shops may have them. Take jibs advice it should work.
Haha that's a big one! Where do you get your earthworms from? Now that I think about it I bought some worms from PetSmart during the summer and it ignored it. But I'll try harder this time around. Starve it a few days and will trick it to eating it.
Those are cool clay caves. Did you have them custom made?
I used to go farms near by and pay money to kids to give me earthworms, and I used to culture them.
Those caves are terracotta roofing tiles I picked up, and use them as caves
The medication could have irritated your eels skin? A lot of meds are advised to half dose if you have scaleless fish. They do go white when they get scrapes too though.
The way I got my fire eels to start on other foods is by using red wigglers. They are usually available at Petsmart, Walmart, and bait shops. I used to just chop them up into 1/2” pieces and mix them into the thawed bloodworms in a glass. They would ignore them at first, but then they started getting curious about them and began eating them. Once they put on size, they generally start accepting a lot of different foods. Mine will eat just about anything frozen and night crawlers. My three eels range from about 20” up to 25” long. They are very bulky too. One is much more bulky than the others though, but they all eat very well.
I have a thread somewhere about how I make my frozen food mix from Walmart using frozen tilapia, frozen shrimp, and frozen scallops. I can make about 8 lbs of food for around $25. That lasts me about 4-5 months if I feed it exclusively, but my last batch lasted about 7 months because I try to feed a variety of foods including night crawlers, frozen krill, frozen squid, and my frozen food mix. My eels don’t eat any pellets though.
I have a thread somewhere about how I make my frozen food mix from Walmart using frozen tilapia, frozen shrimp, and frozen scallops. I can make about 8 lbs of food for around $25. That lasts me about 4-5 months if I feed it exclusively, but my last batch lasted about 7 months because I try to feed a variety of foods including night crawlers, frozen krill, frozen squid, and my frozen food mix. My eels don’t eat any pellets though.
Very cool I may try to raise some worms this summer.
