I thought that I would share a super success story!
I was at whits end with my three 6" RBP's and planning on getting rid of them. They had become annoying due to their skittishness and refusal to eat anything other than live feeders and even then only when no one was watching.
I am all but DONE with feeding ANY of my fish species live feeders from ANY LFS!
I do have a spring fed farm pond roughly 150' across with bazillions of bluegills in it. I generally use bluegill fry as live feeders for some of my other species. My buddies daughter caught a number of Bluegills a couple of weeks ago, and I put two 8"ers in the RBP tank for them to devour. Much to my surprise, the Bluegills beat the tar out of the RBP's!
The Bluegills greedily accepted fish fillet chunks of meat in a very aggressive fashion. After two days of this, one of the RBP's decided to enter the fray and accept the meat chunks. The next day the other two followed suit.
This had to be the greatest turnaround in fish behavior that I have seen to date. They all are now sharing the tank peacefully and eating fish meat chunks as soon as they hit the water. After two weeks the RBP's no longer even flinch when the lights are turned on, or when someone walks by the tanks. They have also ceased biting massive chunks out of each other!
Now my only concern is whether or not to remove the two slightly larger Bluegills to reduce the bio-load on the tank.
I was at whits end with my three 6" RBP's and planning on getting rid of them. They had become annoying due to their skittishness and refusal to eat anything other than live feeders and even then only when no one was watching.
I am all but DONE with feeding ANY of my fish species live feeders from ANY LFS!
I do have a spring fed farm pond roughly 150' across with bazillions of bluegills in it. I generally use bluegill fry as live feeders for some of my other species. My buddies daughter caught a number of Bluegills a couple of weeks ago, and I put two 8"ers in the RBP tank for them to devour. Much to my surprise, the Bluegills beat the tar out of the RBP's!
The Bluegills greedily accepted fish fillet chunks of meat in a very aggressive fashion. After two days of this, one of the RBP's decided to enter the fray and accept the meat chunks. The next day the other two followed suit.
This had to be the greatest turnaround in fish behavior that I have seen to date. They all are now sharing the tank peacefully and eating fish meat chunks as soon as they hit the water. After two weeks the RBP's no longer even flinch when the lights are turned on, or when someone walks by the tanks. They have also ceased biting massive chunks out of each other!
Now my only concern is whether or not to remove the two slightly larger Bluegills to reduce the bio-load on the tank.
