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.
