Sunfish diet?

[Pyramid_Party]

Hi,

I got (6) six small Dollar Sunfish. At first I was feeding them daphnia, live blackworms, scuds, frozen bloodworms, and frozen brine shrimp. They love the live food the most, then the bloodworms, and barely like brine shrimp. I tried frozen mysis shrimp and they eat it but it is not their favorite. I bought some Hikari pellets and they strike it but spit it out. I noticed some people mentioning New Life Spectrum pellets so I bought some small sinking pellets. Same thing, they spit it out. I have kept trying and now they eat it some times but spit it out half the time. Interestingly, they will eat fish flakes.


So they will eat no problem: Daphnia, Scuds, Live Blackworms, frozen bloodworms, and flakes.

I am going to stop feeding them brine shrimp and I will still try to feed pellets. If anyone knows a good way to get them pellet trained let me know. Also today I bought a dozen small crickets to see if the Dollars would like them. Yep, no problem. As soon as I dropped them in they went crazy. So I am gonna add live crickets to the list but this will only be a treat. Is there anything that should be in their diet that I am missing? Anything I should take out of their diet? I have a question: does anyone know if they will graze on algae? I got hair algae as well as some green algae on rocks but I don't watch them long enough to see if they ever eat it.

Thanks

 

[Gill Blue]

quit feeding them. once you're sure they're healthy and well fed switch to pellets and stick to them. once you've had them on pellets for a month or so, start in with the other stuff again.
freeze dried is a good in-between food if you want to do it that way, but it'll probably take longer, which means more cleaning up uneaten pellets.

 

[Pyramid_Party]

Yeah and the pellets I have are sinking pellets so they hit the floor sooner. But lucky for me I got snails and other scavenging organisms that clean it up. Oh yeah, they will eat snails but only if I smash the snails in my fingers first. If I just toss the snails in they spit them out.

 

[Gill Blue]

while I don't know specifically about the dollars, my snails have learned to hide during the day. both the gills and longears will eat them. every now and I'll see them chewing on something and WOOSH- out comes a bunch of shell slivers.
they didn't start until they were a bit bigger...3-4 inches, but before then they learned to scrape the eggs off the glass.