I soak everything with Garlic Guard for 10-15 mins to stimulate their feeding instinct and improve their immunity. I fed them bloodworms for the first 2-3 days because the seller I bought them from had only fed them bloodworms.
Then, I moved them onto different frozen foods. First, I mixed in a little brine shrimp with BW in a cup w/ garlic guard and they started eating the brine shrimp. A day later, I mixed in some mysis shrimp with BW and they ate the mysis shrimp too. After about a week of giving them just frozen foods, I started mixing in the MicroCrabs with the BW. After 1-2 days of giving them MicroCrabs, you can give them other kind of super high protein sinking pellets like Carnivore or New Life Science.
You gotta get them to recognize a lot of different things as food. If you just feed them frozen or live for weeks and try to starve them onto pellets, they'll just look at the pellets like craps floating by and avoid them. So always mix it with a food they love and get them to eat different foods early on. It might also help to put the pellets and bloodworms in a cup and then pour it into the water instead of just dropping the pellets into the water. When they see you pouring water, they know food is coming and a lot of them will be eating new foods without even seeing what they're biting into.
I think it's important to give them sinking pellets because most of them are too shy to come to the surface. The ones that do quickly dart back down to the bottom, so sinking pellets will get more of your dats to eat. Soak everything in Garlic Guard and mix it with foods that they've eaten and liked before and they should accept the new foods. I recommend the MicroCrabs to ween them onto pellets with because picky fish tend to eat these and they're sinking/baby sized and just right for baby dats.
Also, it helps to increase the temp to 86-87. The higher temps increase their metabolism and make them want to eat more. Plus, it helps to prevent diseases.
