pacu problem
- Thread starter abominus
- Start date
Would recommend feeding it cichlid pellets, or algae wafers or veggie wafers instead of liver. While pacu are omnivores and will eat anything, they will benefit more from a herbivore type diet instead of a carnivore diet. A lot of pacu keepers feed their pacu fruit and veggies. I feed mine algae wafers more because they are messy eaters, and my big fellows just inhale the wafers without bothering to chew.
It has only been 8 days since you started this thread. Probably by the time he is 18 - 20" he will have outgrown his shyness. Our pacu were already 15" when they joined our family. They were not shy.
People feed their pacu just about any fruit and vegetables - grapes, potato.... They are very messy eaters, and the water can quickly become full of food debris (which is why I quit feeding mine this way) Nuts. I fed my pacu almonds, but they inhaled the almonds without chewing. I was afraid that my mechanical filtration plumbing might get jammed up if the almonds were not digested, so quit feeding them almonds. One time I fed them unlimited amounts of watermelon and had an ammonia reading in the water, so quit doing that. Water quality is extremely important for pacu. They are more sensitive to nitrogen products than their counterparts in the wild. I do enough water changes every day to keep nitrates below 5ppm. Watching pacu eat is extremely entertaining for us. Water quality issues made us switch to sinking veggie pellets where there is no mess in the water after they eat.
Here are some very old videos of our pacu eating. You can see the water quality is terrible after they eat with food debris everywhere. All of that debris will result in increased nitrates.
Eating potato chips (slices of raw potato) notice all the potato debris in the water. Leonardo nips at Adonis' tail, causing Adonis to swallow and get his potato stuck in his mouth. When he tries to pick up his last slice, he is unable to pick it up with the potato still in his mouth. Leonardo gets the last piece and grins as he polishes it off.
Pacu tag team a whole carrot
End of the carrot - there is also a big piece of brocholi in the water
I did a comparison of different fish food. Even the pond pellets have adequate nutrition for pacu, except that they float. If you have overflow boxes and sump filtration, this might become problematic with the floating food entering the overflow boxes and filtration (it did for us, which is why we switched to sinking food) I would not feed the game fish chow or the Massivore. I put those in just for comparison.
They definitely want to be where the action is. Terribly curious about the world inside and outside of their tank. Leonardo squeezed into the corner of the tank to watch me work on the filter behind the tank.
They get in the way when I'm cleaning the walls of their tank. Literally try to swim between the brush and the wall. They used to push each other out of the way for petting. They are like pet dogs in a tank of water.
Leonardo is anything but shy. Does Leonardo look scared? BTW, I belong to a pacu forum and the most frequently asked question is "what gender is my pacu?" I did online searches and discovered that my boys Adonis and Leonardo de Fishio are actually female. They have been family members for 18 years, and I'm too old to change their names. They will forever be my "boys". The names "Donna" and "Leah" just don't match my boys. Very grateful for this age of gender fluidity, and that my boys can be whatever I identify them to be.
My pacu also recognize me. I can dance around, flail my arms around, and they just watch me. Had a stranger come up to the tank (stranger to them), and they went into full freak out mode
