TSN not eating help!

  • We are currently upgrading MFK. thanks! -neo
Ok.. So it's week 4 with this sob ... And he's getting a little bit better. He never ate in from of me and only started eating now. But how he is picky about his food. I tried feeding him shrimp pellets, cichlids sinking gold, and carnivore pellets from hikari. The only thing he eats is the hikari carnivore pellets... Luckily he's dumb enough to suck the pellets in, cause I sometimes put the other pellets next to Te carnivore pellets and he eats them at the same time. BUT he still is picky... Has anyone ever tried ken's catfish pellets?


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With this small of a tsn I always use blood worms in the begining. I usually start small catfish off in their own tank as well and do daily 10% water changes. Seems to keep their appetite high while keeping water params in check. I use a dropper. Like the ones with the black rubber back end and glass tube. One that small wont need a lot. Tank one cube of the frozen blood worms and put it in a capfull of hot water to disolve it. Now use the dropper to suck up the blood worms and some water. Make sure your other fish are fat and happy before doing this or they might freak him out. put the dropper a few inches away from him and gently squirt the bloodworms towards his head. I've had baby tsn less than 2" come up and actually attack the dropper trying to get more out. lol kind of like a baby bottle for a catfish. On the other hand if your catfish has been in your tank less than a week it could just be stress. It will take him a while before he will take pellets from the top more than likely. I usually do blood worms until they are over 5" then switch to shrimp or prawn chunks they can manage easily. After they are over 12" usually they can eat whole shrimp and chunks of fish fillet. Once over 2' they can eat half or whole fillets depending on size of fillets as well as very large shrimp. Once over 2.5'-3' should take almost anything at that point. Since my fish were all getting sick off of feeders about 5 years ago i switched to non-live and have had almost no sickness at all in my cats. If I do feeders I will quarantine them for several weeks and fatten them up with cichlid pellets as well as aggressive water changes to ensure they are healthy. Then after they are nice and plump and have a clean bill of health I will feed them to my pets. This is not done really to feed them very much(you'd go broke trying to feed a tsn feeders for life) it's more just to observe their predatory behavior and give them something to do. It's more interesting to put like 1 feeder a day once they are quarantined. i always start my fish off on blood worms from a dropper though. Even extremely finicky species that are very hard to get off live this method has worked. Planiceps, lima, rtc, tsn, filamentosum, juru, jau, ect..... this method has not failed me yet. Clean water, no aggressive fish while small, clean and healthy foods, and he will be eating and growing you out of a house and home. :) good luck and keep us posted.
 
oh didn't see your newest post. Never tried those pellets. I try to keep my catfish as close to natural foods as possible. I supplement their diet with pellets, but use shrimp and fish fillets cut according to the size of the catfish mostly.
 
IME and IMO, TSNs strongly prefer fleshy foods (as also obvious from Necrocanis' posts above) to any dry foods. Many keepers managed to only feed them dry but (when) given a choice, they will always choose and hold out for flesh, unlike e.g., RTC, Leiarius, Pimelodus, etc.
 
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