Acclimation?

[P.A.NativesBPM]

Hello,

I will be purchasing my fire eel soon and I'm wondering how I should acclimate him.

Float and drip, or float and pour water in the bag periodically?

Also, I'm worried about the spines when I net him out. Should I get him out another way?

Lastly, I'm planning to start him feeding on bloodworms, and then move over to night crawlers, and then start stuffing them with NLS pellets and then try to get him to pellets alone. Is this a good plan?


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[MonsterMinis]

I would suggest live blackworms vs bloodworms.. much more nutritiouse and you can dump a bagfull into the tank once a week or so and just replenish as he eats them. I've done this with my newest lil' guy and he's grown a good 1"-2" a month since I got him. Once he hit 12" ( which should be in the next month or so already!) I will continue to feed the blackworms but also chop up nightcrawlers at the end of feeding cycle and start conversion over to them. I use to start my spineys of any species on bloodworms and got minimal growth and imo overall poorer health now all my babaies are very active and vibrant creatures from the start.

as for acclimation everyone does things different.. if you are picking the bag up directly from your LFS before it hits their tank ( ime the best way to get any special ordered fish.. less stress overall since the fish isn't being acclimated a bunch of times in a short period) I just float the bag until the temps adjust and dump the fish into it's QT tank... and these guys should always be QTed, eating , and de-wormed for IPS before hitting any "main tank" lots of hideing spaces in the QT tank. I prefer driftwood but pvc and other decor will work as long as it has no sharp edges ect. Otherwise a typical drip acclimation works fine too.. I've just had one to many huge ammonia spikes when opening bags and going that route to be "happy" dripping unless it came from really hard going into really soft or vice versa.

Pellets are a great aspiration but reality is a vast majority will never take pellets, so be Ok with that before getting one. I've never owned a spiney that will reliably take pellets. I know there are a few around. and starveing them usually will kill them as they will either literally starve to death or jump out looking for food.

as for handleing I use the same nets I do for rays and haven't had issue... I just try and be gentle and not get the fish thrashing and like a wet noodle let them slither headfirst into the tank. Since I started that in moving all my spineys It has made moving my bigger ones 10x better at moving since the spines are much more formidable.

 

[Yoimbrian]

I recently got a tire track eel and my acclimation plan was to float the bag for a while, then slowly add tank water to his bag, then net him into the tank.

The best laid plans always fail.

I floated the bag successfully (not much that can go wrong there), but when I opened up the top (still floating) the feisty guy jumped out, cleared the water of the bag, and landed in the main aquarium. He was fine and is thriving.