Fish not eating anything I feed them
- Thread starter Jacob._.merc
- Start date
There's one thing that worked to make my picky green terror eat pellets. I crushed the pellets into a powder and turned them into gel food with unflavoured Knox Gelatin. It took him a few days to fully accept it, and once he was eating that, I started reducing the amount of gelatin to slowly get him used to harder food. Eventually, I stopped crushing the pellets and just added enough gelatin to hold them together. He would eat that, but he was making such a mess when he ate (sending dust out of his gills) that I decided to give up on that and keep him on Omega One's frozen formulas. If I had decided to keep it up, the next step would have been to break up the pellet gel into individual pellets, and then eventually to give him normal pellets. But my fish was alone in his tank, so there was no one else to eat the food particles he was sending everywhere while I was getting him used to the food, so that's why I decided to give up. But if you have other fish in the tank to help clean up the mess while you're getting them used to the food, that method might work for you.
If the fish used to like pellets and then suddenly started refusing them, I would suspect internal parasites. My green terror had capillaria worms. He stopped eating pellets first, but still ate frozen food with appetite for at least a month before he started spitting that out too. I would strongly recommend examining their feces with a microscope.
By the way, Hex-Shield is medicated pellets. So if your fish are spitting out pellets, they will spit that out too. To give medicated food to my green terror, I made gel food with bloodworms instead of medicated pellets.
Have you checked your ammonia, nitrite and nitrates levels?
I fed them those Omega one cichlid formula cubes twice today and they all ate them. What I meant by they don't eat the pellets is they don't eat THESE pellets that I am feeding them right now. I am thinking they are just very picky about what they eat. I put in some shrimp last night and when I woke up it was all gone so someone ate them.
These are the fish I stress about the most. Doesn't the Fossorochromis look really skinny on his head? I've never seen one look like this. It was like that when I purchased it. The other is the Copadichromis, I never see him eat but he looks like he eats as he's got a belly going on for him. Although he has lost his beautiful coloration withing the past week. He just had ich so I had to treat him for that, and that has completely passed.
I have a microscope, I'll see if I can see anything. And no, I've never really checked nitrates or anything like that before.
I'm not sure about any of that. I've never checked those before
Good to know, you may want to grab a kit. Your wc schedule is pretty awesome from what you are telling us. But even with that, you may want to check just to be sure
I worked at a pet store briefly and a customer came in with a water sample from a tank that his fish started dying and he had a very similar wc schedule as you. Planted tank and all the right things. Tested his water and nitrates were through the roof. Test was almost blood red.
I worked at a pet store briefly and a customer came in with a water sample from a tank that his fish started dying and he had a very similar wc schedule as you. Planted tank and all the right things. Tested his water and nitrates were through the roof. Test was almost blood red.
