bgk question

[aeri]

took me 4 months to get my ck off of feeders that the previous owner raised it on.
they dont go back to normal food.

even so goldfish feeders are like mcdonalds. if u have the money and want to that much just to get a mixture of different types of feeders then that's fine.
but pellets tend to offer more nutrients than a goldfish would.

my other ck on pellets and shrimp grew significantly faster than the other one that was hooked on feeders. dont piss away a good fish

 

[cmartin]

I have a BGK - almost 10 inches - he has never touched any of the fish in the tank - and I even had a few Danio fry (about 2 months old) that I had to put into the tank - they are still there and now fully grown.

I avoid having live bearers in the tank - lots of egg layers.
If I want to give my BGK a real feast I just do a larger than usual water change and bump the temp by a degree or two....and my BGK gets a big belly....

Eating the eggs is one thing, but I got into the hobby to keep my fish...not feed them to each other. Just a personal choice I guess.

 

[Valkyrie]

I have a 14" BGK and have never deliberately fed him live food. He does not touch the larger fish with him, but I once added a school of neon's about 20 to the tank for some colour and lost them in 2 days. Far easier to hand feed and less likely to accidentally introduce disease into your tank with feeders.

Cheers

 

[Munroser]

I'm not against live feeders. If I have stored them in my spare tank for awhile and know that they are all okay, I have been known to feed them to my TSN who will eat ANY fish that is big enough to fit in his mouth bar none. The Ghost Knife though, who will outlive almost all of your other fish, can cohabitate with small fish. So when those smaller fish die a natural death and you want to replace them, and you have been feeding live fish to your Ghost Knife, you can be sure that when you add new smaller fish...even if you grow them out before you add them to the tank... they will get eaten. I thought I was safe with Starbursts because they were they same size as my Black Skirts, but no...they were ALL new and he ate them overnight...yeah, six of them AND some neons. I was devasted and scared that he would die from bloat or something.

On top of that, if your BGK lives half as long as they are alleged to live (30 years), it would be a real bummer to have one crappy feeder fish kill him half way through his or her potential life expectancy. Ghost Knives, in my opinion, are like the "City Slicker" version of "Ancient Sea Monsters" or the "Domesticated Parrot" of the "Domesticated Fish World." It's just my opinion, but pellets and frozen bloodworms (or something similar) are the best way to go.

 

[pwmin]

come to think of it, I don't think mine has ever eaten any feeders. I never gave it any until I threw some in for my payara and it never ate any. it's fun to watch them hunt w/ feeders, but there are definitely a lot of things that are better to be feeding, esp. if the feeders are goldfish.