How long is too long when starving a fish?

[peanut]

to answer your ? about how long is too long. first off fish are cold blooded and can survive without food for great periods of time as can reptiles. of course smaller fish will waste away faster than large fish. i had 2 fish come down with septicemia or hole in the head ( they had white stringy **** and stopped eating after a few months of this). anyways, i was attatched to these fish and they were sick so i would not have aten them, so i decided to treat them. they did not eat for about 8 weeks maybe a bit more and looked to be turning into skeletons. i treated them with metronidazole for 3 weeks doing complete water changes every day. after 2 monthsor so i transfered them out of the hospital tank into my 300 since they had stopped the white poop. after a week or 2 the fish slowly started to eat again. the whole process lasted about 2.5 months and the fish were sick, but recovered greatly. most say once the fish stops eating it is too late but it is not. if your fish are healthy starve them until they take to the pellets or fresh food and dont give in until it looks as though they are on their last leg. these fish are tough customers. just because we are warm blooded we think that they need to eat as we do. not true. starve em and they will eventually take to something other than live feeders

i agree with you so much they will eat in the end

 

[astronatus]

I thought the main drawback to live feeder fish was that they give your fish a fatty liver, which kills them prematurely. I know parasites are a true problem as well... I have a P Bass that wont take absolutely anything but live fish-not worms or other live stuff, only fish.

And I never saw fish get parasites from earthworms, crickets, mealworms, maxworms, ghost shrimp ....

I also don't get the financial aspect. If I cannot afford to provide for a pet I simply don't get it until I have enough money.

No intent to flame anyone. Just trying to diversify the views...
HarleyK

 

[Redtail_Watcher]

i use to try to starve my peackok eel, for a month but it ended up eating everything in my tank, like one of my brothers fan tail a hand full of cichlids. after all that i just gave up and feed it minnows and gold fish.(i think i may be impossible to feed eels like that anything else. It may be like the Peackok basses diet, only eat fish.)

 

[guppy]

Fire eels love small earthworms and if you sprinkle some bit of frozen shrimp or clams in with the worms the will start to associate it as food.

 

[CHOMPERS]

WOW, talk about digging up an old dead thread. This has almost made it to the one year mark. The problem with digging them up is when new people do not read the first twelve pages and then start asking the same questions that were answered eight times already.

And some people who were active last year are not here anymore...

But it is good to know that there are still some people that are reading the archives

 

[ewurm]

I would have to say that when the fish is rotting at the bottom of the tank and the rest of your fish are developing fungus, that is a bit too long.

 

[Newt]

I would have to say that when the fish is rotting at the bottom of the tank and the rest of your fish are developing fungus, that is a bit too long.

Wow! Old thread!

My eel jumped earlier this summer there is a thread about that somewhere.

I never did get the eel to eat anything but live foods, it would grab krill but never eat it. The eel was eating earthworms and shrimp until the day it died. I was gut loading the shirmp and worms and the eel was about 20" when it jumped.

 

[ewurm]

I put a few misc. minnows in my tank for my Bass and Oscar awhile back. A month later I found that the tank smelled. I used carbon, purigen and a chemical to remove the smell. I just found the cause: a dead Brook Stickleback rotting behind the tank. LOL

 

[Lil_Stinker]

I read the whole thing, but in the end the eel died. I hate sad endings.