Hello, before I bought a 2-3 inches arapaima. I wanna know if I should feed them high-quality small pellets constantly or should I just leave it with large amounts of feeder fish because I know that young arapaima needs food constantly. Second, will they actively try to find a hole or a way to jump out like arowana and snakehead? I have something to close the cement pond, but it just can't cover the entire pond, the edge of the pond will still be opened. I've had my fair share experiences with fish jumping before, but they're not species that would actively try to find a spot to escape . They just jumped because they were spooked or something.
Juvenile Arapaima Care
- Thread starter Pyluper
- Start date
Never had the space to keep arapaima but i've kept most arowana species. Personally all the arowanas i've kept never were aggressive jumpers with the exception of the rare instances were I had to turn on the room light late at night. However, I have seen many jumpy arowanas and typically it was due to either something small moving above the tank or the tank dimensions being too small for the fish.
As for what food to feed I would stick with pellets unless you're farming the feeder fish yourself (IMO if you still want to stick for "live food" insect feeders would trigger a better feeding reaction for a fish that size and probably cheaper). Just throw a few small pellets in and wait 30s - 2mins away from the tank to get it comfortable with eating pellets; if you're lucky the fish won't even care if you're nearby. In the unfortunate scenario that the fish does not eat the pellets in that 2min window immediately remove the pellets and starve it for 1-3 days then try again. Remember to do this for at most a week or until you see the fish's belly appearing very flat/skinny otherwise you may starve your fish to death. In that worse case-scenario I would use insect feeders to fatten the fish up and then try to pellet train it again.