Getting fish to eat ...

[Michelle]

My Apisto cacatuoides and Apisto bitaeniata are somewhat picky with the dry foods. Pellet foods are completely ignored and they don't seem to go for the flake very readily.

Ordinarily I feed mainly flake food with live or frozen food every few days.

Since my move to the South West my LFS rarely has anything but bloodworm or shrimp in the live foods (not very Apisto friendly, especially for these youngsters) and last time I visited didn't have any frozen food in stock either! Incredibly poor. All the other FSs in the area are a lot further away, in opposite directions and don't always stock live food either.

Several questions then:

How to get my fish to eat dry foods? One group of the A bitaeniata seem to take the flake food reasonably well but the other group and the A cacas rarely take it. I feed them the same way, although they are in different tanks, if that makes a difference.

How do you keep a culture of say Daphnia? Where do I get a decent starter culture from?

Is there a good on-line supplier for frozen foods? Also, is it still frozen when it arrives or do you have to use it fairly quickly? (Not essential as I can stock up when I am farther afield but annoying).

Sound like really stupid questions to me but I've never had a problem with sourcing food nor fish not eating everything in sight before so I'm a bit flummoxed.

[dw1305]

Hi all,
I feed some Grindal worms with new food, Apistogramma really like them, and they are easy to keep as long as you keep sub-culturing them. Usually a very small amount of Grindal worms will attract the fish and eventually they will eat the dry food. I like the red Astax crumb as dried food.

For fry I feed Micro or Banana worms with powered Astax crumb and/or "Freeze Dried Arctic Copepods".

Daphnia are a bit trickier to keep as an indoor culture. I now use the grass method from caudata.org <http://www.britishcichlid.org.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=1327> & <http://www.britishcichlid.org.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=7413&start=0>, and this keeps a trickle of Daphnia going all through the winter.

Another option is California Black-worm (Lumbriculus). I culture these in the buckets with the Daphnia, and in the bottom of the external filter.

PM me if any of those are any use to you.

cheers Darrel