Arowana won’t eat Northfin

[neutrino]

...Yes, I know, chicken are not mammals, lol, and I spotted a little typo in my earlier post also. Oh, well. That's what I get for being low on energy today and trying to keep it simple.

Anyway (interesting how many of us here go way back), going back to the 60s I've never once fed beef heart, including for discus. It never made sense to me either. So in any debate over it, what I can categorically say is it's just not necessary. I did feed a lot of live brine shrimp along with flakes or pellets back in the day, including when I kept arowana, but some of that is what they get used to imo. Now, other than pellets, my fish get freeze dried mysis and the like.

 

[RD.]

FYI……. I have tried NF, not with aros, but with fish typically far less picky. They liked it, for a very short duration. Now they refuse to eat it. This was with large cichlids, including an adult male midas in the 14” range. He won’t even look at them now, ditto with other fish that will eat almost anything. Go figure. This was the large floating Northfin formula. If your fish is eating Hikari, I would just continue with that, with a rotation of other fresh/frozen/live foods. Good luck.

 

[Taminik]

I read this as "arowana won't eat nuffin" for some reason lol. In all seriousness tho, switch over to hikari floating sticks if you want to pellet train. I've never seen an aro not eat them after a short time.

Mine does eat those but not north fin

 

[Taminik]

Nothing could be further from the truth. If this were the case the answer to the ongoing search for a sustainable alternate protein sources in fish feed could be ground up poultry feathers, technically high in protein.

Digestibility and amino acid and lipid profile matter, and differ according to protein source. This is nutrition 101-- and since amino acid requirements vary by species, this is fish nutrition 101. Differences in the quality of protein sources for fish feed is a frequent mention in aquaculture science articles such as the two below, the second dealing with ongoing research into alternatives to fish meal for fish feed-- note the absence of beef, chicken or other mammal based protein in such research.

FA144/FA144: The Concept of Ideal Protein in Formulation of Aquaculture Feeds (ufl.edu)


Protein Sources in Aquaculture Feed: Quality and Nutrition (burdockgroup.com)

Oh I didn’t really know that thank you

 

[Taminik]

FYI……. I have tried NF, not with aros, but with fish typically far less picky. They liked it, for a very short duration. Now they refuse to eat it. This was with large cichlids, including an adult male midas in the 14” range. He won’t even look at them now, ditto with other fish that will eat almost anything. Go figure. This was the large floating Northfin formula. If your fish is eating Hikari, I would just continue with that, with a rotation of other fresh/frozen/live foods. Good luck.

I’m feeding him a variety but I just kinda want to get rid of the northfin and not waste it but my other fish eats the northfin arowana pellets so I would eventually use it up

 

[thiswasgone]

I know this is somewhat of an older thread but here is my 2c:

Been out of the fish keeping game for a while now; college + a house fire really threw me into a loop. However, when I was younger I successfully trained and grew a jardini from 12" to 24" with NLS large float pellets. Much like yourself the previous owner grew the fish on a diet of Hikari floating sticks but I was on MFK back in the day reading posts from RD and the likes about nutrition which led me to NLS pellets. Since I was also keeping large SA cichlids (an umbee, a breeding pair of Jags, and a variety of 5 other small-medium species) as well at the time I thought it was a win-win.

While my cichlids were more accepting of NLS pellets it was still a slight "struggle" for my Jag and smaller fish to get get used to the new dense pellets. My Umbee of course had very little trouble adjusting but I attribute that to his personality more than anything.

My jardini however would be like yours and refuse to eat the NLS pellets. I did also go the market prawn route but that crafty fish quickly learned to split the two after "chewing" and would almost always spit out the pellet (I would stuff it in the shrimp via the "vien" line). I attempted to use smaller NLS pellets and just peppered the shrimp that way but it eventually became more work than I wanted to put in he would not eat the smaller pellets if they fell out (stuffing the shrimp then cleaning up and pellets that were released by the jardini's chewing). In the end starvation was the only way to get him to learn that the NLS pellets was the only food he was going to get. If memory serves me correctly it took me about 2-3 weeks total. I would not feed him for 1-2 days then drop a single NLS pellet a day to test the waters. As I had other things to do at the time and other fish to feed I would wait about 5-10 minutes then come back to check. If he refused the pellet I would scoop it up (it was saturated and at the bottom of the tank usually) and then wait 1-2 days again. If he ate the pellet I would feed at most 3 pellets that session to keep the hunger there. When I was confident he was ready that's when I restarted his daily (and eventual bi-daily) feedings twice a day.

One thing I regret not doing was not pre-soaking the pellets when teaching him to eat the pellets as it made him learn a bad habit of at times waiting for the pellets to fully soak and sink before eating them. I tried to pre-soak after realizing he would do this behaviour but it was engrained into him so I grave up pre-soaking as it was letting the pellet collapse faster in the tank.