I though I might share with my fellow crencichlaholics that I finally got my Regani to eat flakes and pellets!!!! I have had great success converting my larger pike species to non-live food but I have spent months trying to get my dwarf pikes off black and blood worms (frozen and live). I even tried fasting them for a while but nothing seemed to work.
I needed to move my colony of Regani to another tank in order to make room for some new pikes I plan on getting. In my fish room I have pike's in almost all my tanks so my choices were very limit. I finally decided to put the Regani in a grow out tank with some 1-2" Geo sp Balzani in it.
Well when it came to feeding this tank the Balzani's would eat anything but I still had to feed some live/frozen food to the pikes. After a while I notice when I tossed in some NLS pellets or flakes, the pikes would see the Geo's eating franticly, so the pikes would play copycat and try the food for themselves. Now even though the pikes would just spit the food out, I had realized that I have made some progress because they never even attempted to try the food before.
I then started to decrease the live/frozen and increased the pellets and flakes. The pikes slowly started to eat more and more flakes and then I notice an acute increase in the pellet intake. I eventually stop feeding the frozen/live for a while and things were going great, but I realized that it was time for the final test.
I tossed in some live black worms, and as you would expect all the fish polished them off, and the best part is they still ate the flakes/pellets. I now add live/frozen twice weekly but they are mostly on pellets/flakes. Now if I could only get my Notos and Wallaci pikes off frozen/live, I would be a happy man LOL.
I needed to move my colony of Regani to another tank in order to make room for some new pikes I plan on getting. In my fish room I have pike's in almost all my tanks so my choices were very limit. I finally decided to put the Regani in a grow out tank with some 1-2" Geo sp Balzani in it.
Well when it came to feeding this tank the Balzani's would eat anything but I still had to feed some live/frozen food to the pikes. After a while I notice when I tossed in some NLS pellets or flakes, the pikes would see the Geo's eating franticly, so the pikes would play copycat and try the food for themselves. Now even though the pikes would just spit the food out, I had realized that I have made some progress because they never even attempted to try the food before.
I then started to decrease the live/frozen and increased the pellets and flakes. The pikes slowly started to eat more and more flakes and then I notice an acute increase in the pellet intake. I eventually stop feeding the frozen/live for a while and things were going great, but I realized that it was time for the final test.
I tossed in some live black worms, and as you would expect all the fish polished them off, and the best part is they still ate the flakes/pellets. I now add live/frozen twice weekly but they are mostly on pellets/flakes. Now if I could only get my Notos and Wallaci pikes off frozen/live, I would be a happy man LOL.
