Feeder goldfish or guppies
- Thread starter Darryl Taylor
- Start date
Yeah large predators often have a hard time eating anything but live food. Ik to get my pike Cichlids to eat artificial, I used to tie shrimp to a small string and move it in the tank like it was alive. After a while I would just drop the shrimp in and they would eat it. And then after that I switched to shrimp pellets and then they were on artificial foods finally. It took me a few months to do so but I eventually got it done.
Cichla are easy to convert to pellets. You can try the pellets or die method. You can also stuff pellets into cut or whole fish. I’ve never had a bass that wouldn’t eat pellets.
I know I've only had a few fish I had to convert from live to pellets. Mainly my 2 pike Cichlids and my roommate's Jaguar cichlid. The Pike's were a pain compared to the jag. The Pike's took a month or 2 each to get off of live and onto artificial. First 2 weeks I had them, they starved themselves to the point they were showing their ribcages. It was mainly the lfs's fault, they had them in a tank with an all you can eat buffet of feeders. The jag was much easier, only took a couple weeks to get it eating artificial. Again it had the same buffet of feeders at the lfs. Granted also had wild caught predator fish from the local lakes here that took to artificial immediately (largemouth, crappie, and bluegill). So I guess it just depends on the fish itself.
Northfin and New Life Spectrum are the main good ones, some use cobalt and hikari and these work, but don't have as high quality ingredients as the Northfin and New Life Spectrum
