Re-learning non-live food

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pelleeklund

Peacock Bass
MFK Member
May 23, 2009
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Pennsylvania
Recently I converted my mono to mysis shrimp cubes using the method Dieselmack has in his sticky at the top of this forum. It worked well until I screwed it up by changing to cubes of beefheart due to inconvienent mysis shrimp cube availability. During the successful days I was still throwing him feeders often enough that he never really made more than two days without live food, so the instinct never really left. In all he was tearing up the cubes for about two weeks along with a sparse amount of my remaining feeders. I ran out of feeders about the same time I ran out of shrimp cubes. When I went to the store I picked up the substitute beefheart when I couldn't find the shrimp, because I figured that the familiar shape of the cube would be acceptable and maybe even beneficial variety for the fishes diet. It wasn't, and the fish spent about a week hitting the cubes and donating them to his tank mates. After stubbornly fighting to push the beef heart for about 5 days, I picked up some live food to hold him off until I could find some shrimp cubes. Now I have the shrimp cubes and he won't take them either. I have been trying much longer than it originally took him to figure it out so i'm worried the whole process may have been corrupted by a sequence of untimely mistakes. Has anyone ever dealt with this and is it correctable? Repeating the process is becoming costly and isn't getting any results so if anybody could help, what are some of my options? Thanks to anyone who can help.
 
These are the most picky fish on earth, i had Pirahnas eating pellets, and there flesh eaters, cant understand it. My three 6 inch Mono's are still eating live......Good luck.
 
fishead;3474103; said:
These are the most picky fish on earth, i had Pirahnas eating pellets, and there flesh eaters, cant understand it. My three 6 inch Mono's are still eating live......Good luck.
All piscivorous fish are flesh eaters:screwy:. Piranha's are mainly scavengers anyways, no wonder it was easy to get them on pellets. All my peacock bass are on dead food because I don't want to take the chance, and plus. I do not cave into feeding feeders.
 
That doesn't help at all, but thanks for letting me know how you feel about everything. All I know is that this dude eats fish and doesn't eat dry food and Im trying to reverse that. I would feed him dead food if he would eat it.... matter of fact, that's what Im trying to do. It would be nice not to shlep to the god damn store every few days to fork out money for him, not to mention keep a whole second tank dedicated to feeders. So if you would care to step down for a second and explain how you convinced your fish to eat dry, please do, Im obviously not as enlightened.
 
Well, for starters, how larrge are they? I have never introduced feeders to my fish. I started them on live bloodworms, then threw some FD bloodworms into the current, they ate that, and so I taught them to eat stuff off the surface. After they were big enough to, I threw in pieces of FD krill and they love it.
 
I got it at 4 inches from a store that only fed it feeders and claimed it was wild caught. It didn't even look at any food I put in the tank and only responded the movement of prey. At about seven inches I began the process of teaching it to hit dry food, something that came easy at first because I had been feeding him one fish at a time for months. As I said everything went great for a while until the beefheart / mysis shrimp switcheroo brought me back to square one.
 
Try FD krill. That has large pieces.
 
I think I just got lucky with my P-Bass. I have 2 mono's and they were both off of live foods by the time they were 5-6". They are between 11-13" now and without a problem will eat massivore pellets, small pellets meant for pictus catfish and other bottom feeders, fish fillets (haven't found one they won't eat yet) live fish, and shrimp.

They love to smash the food as soon as I drop it in. And my 15" RTC x TSN will come right up to the top and eat whatever they are eating with them, so will my 10" yellow bullhead (who is actually the bully of the tank, chases the big cats around and once took a big bite out of my Pbass *10" at the time* !

My approx 15" TSN never gets in on the action and just sits on the bottom usually, I only see him swimming when the lights are off.
 
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