New Jag not eating

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dsandford

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Oct 31, 2008
75
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BC, Canada
So I picked up a wild jag last saturday from a LFS that specializes in wild CA and SA fish, and he is currently about 8 inches long. In the store the fish ate feeders so I figured that he would be a good eater. The problem is I can't get him to eat anything, even after 5 days of having him. I have tried feeding him pellets, mealworms, raw shrimp, and bloodworms. He will just circle the food like he is waiting for it to move. I assume that since it was wild, it is use to eating other fish and insects, but I don't feel safe feeding him feeders for the obvious reasons. I currently have a pair of convicts that are almost at the right size to breed, so when they do i can probably start feeding him the fry I Hope? In the meantime I need to find some way to get him to eat, and was wondering how some of you guys have managed to fix this problem?

Thanks
 
i had the same problem a while back
my advise
since he is wild
i suggest buying some lets say mollies or anything cheap.. just dont get the goldfish as they usually are kept in very bad conditions.
feed him and fatten him up
than starve onto shrimp and pellets
mine broke after 2 weeks
in the mean time
buy a cheap 10 gallon tank and quarantine goldfish feeders until they are healthy enough to feed.
Quick tip is buy garlic guard from seachem.. seems to help with the taste of pellets.. helped my jag
 
if you are worried about the feeders, try crickets, i have bad luck with any store bought feeders of any type, now i use crickets whenever i have to.
 
Raw chicken livers work,too. They come in a small 20oz tub for about $2.50 at grocery stores. You have to cut them up into manageable pieces. I use cutlery scissors. Don't mind the blood! My cichlids love it. Just don't make it a staple diet. It can be messy. The liver will fatten up your jag quick and ween him off live food.
 
i would buy the feeders from the same place you bought the jag from since he did well there with there feeders and slowly work him off the feeders
 
Most pet and fish food are made from mammalian and beer brewery by-products. I'm not suggesting feeding hamburgers and steak to a fish. Liver is more digestible than the beef hearts available at LFS. I use it as a part of a rounded diet with a variety of other food.
 
The last time a jag had a chicken to devour in the wild, I was cross breeding an arapima with a mosquito rasbora. Try guppys but first gut load the guppys with prazipro brine. That way they are free of any internal parasites. And slowly go to a pellet diet. Another option is trying frozen and then thawed feeder gold fish. Freezing them will kill any harmfull parasite or bacteria living within them. But whatever fish you end up feeding to your jag gut load so they are high in nutrients.
 
All this "Self-righteous BS" on this site is killin' me.

I had the exact same problem with my Jag. He did eat brine shrimp flake tho but nothing in the way of pellets. I started feeding him large feeder comets - after a few short months of feeeders he now he eats everything - including massivore delight and is growing fast. Nearly a year later he still eats 1 comet a day and luvs it and has never and I do mean NEVER had a disease.
Most of the fish I keep are Characins and will only eat live foods. Mollies @ $1 a piece for me is un-affordable as my fish eat 50-100 feeders weekly. My fish might get ick once every blue moon - clettted cooper ick is gone 2-3 days max. To combat the lack of nutrition in goldfish you seed them - I feed them crumbled up massivore, hikari micropellets and supirulina - when my other fish eat these goldfish these foods are then transfered to my characins.

Best of luck and hope this helps.
 
I had great luck with comits for about 6 years and then I got a bad batch. They were infected with some kind of internal parasite. Regardless of treatments my stock was literally cut in half I lost a breeding pair of salvini, 5 year old dovii, 2 oscars and a few green terrors. So yeah you can trust the same shop and there supplier if you want but from my own experiances if something goes wrong because of what you chose to put in your tank. Its a heavy load and I wish it on nobody. So be forewarned bad things can come from feeding poorly kept feeders.

I don't think that sharing personal experiance counts as self-righteous bs. That's the point of this forum.
 
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