Great idea and teaching from a peer on YT (on our latest video above). My responses. Any experiences and thoughts you guys have would be appreciated.
***
gregfurey1104 You've got to love spiny eels. I know you don't feed live foods but if you want to see them grow fast and get chunky you might want to add something like a ice cream tub or big flower pot filled with sand and keep black or tubifex worms in it. The worms can last forever in it and will breed too. It's just a constant food source that will be easiest accessed by the eels and loaches "while they're young" .
Fish-Story Thank you for the interesting idea. What would the worms eat inside the sand filled tub? I imagine one has to feed them somehow. Also, wouldn't the eels burrow into the sand and hunt down all the worms sooner than later?
gregfurey1104 Hello and thanks for the reply,. Feeding the worms is quite easy in theory, once or twice a week you feed them an algae wafer or a pea or two dropped on the top of the tub. Biggest problem feeding them would be if any of the fish had a taste for the wafers. Because of the numbers of the eels and loaches their's a chance they will get eaten before they can breed in the tank. It's still a great way to precision feed them though. A large jar on a windowsill a few inches of sand, water and algae and you can breed them like that too. If you were breeding them that way I throw in a dead fish every few months for protein. When collecting the worms you put a algae wafer in a filter sponge and when the sponge is full of worms you just move that into the tank and the eels can pick them out of that.
Fish-Story I'd give you a thousand likes if I could
Thank you for the teaching and expanding my knowledge so quickly and easily at your expense! Sounds very doable. ... My main concern is once the eels are so used to be fed live worms, would I be able to wean them off onto prepared foods? I've had huge problems with rescued 1ft-1.5ft fire eels before who had been fed live (worms, shrimp) by prior owners and totally refused any prepared feeds in my hands and died from hunger in several months rather than switching to prepared foods, I bent backwards for them, these losses hurt a lot. ... My general philosophy is I start offering any and all fish we get what I want them to accept from the get go. I did have success that way with spiny eels including fire eels, starting from small sizes.
Fish-Story I reposted our little exchange in my favorite forum, hope you don't mind. Let's see if we get any feedback from peers.
gregfurey1104 thank you for your kind words. I appreciate it. It's a good philosophy to have. It really does simplify everything and with a lot of tanks. Easy feedings are a must. Personally, I've never had that issue with eels. I find them to be greedy for foods they like. The way I got around that is the worms are always there on offer, but I still fed a main meal/varied diet. The eels will then go after the easy stuff first. But yea, it's probably best to have them eating what you're going to be feeding them first. Big eels are going to stop hunting the small worms pretty quickly though.
gregfurey1104 awesome thank you. I'll keep an eye on it too. We can never have too much information
Fish-Story "Personally, I've never had that issue with eels. I find them to be greedy for foods they like. The way I got around that is the worms are always there on offer, but I still fed a main meal/varied diet. The eels will then go after the easy stuff first. " ... Thank you. With TT and BS, my experience matches. With fire eels, it doesn't. Are you speaking of fire eels in particular in this post when you say "eels"?
gregfurey1104 ah I see, full disclosure I haven't kept fire eels before. I've kept the tt's and another large type "can't remember the name now,sure I got it just named spiny eel" also the peacock eels and another of the dwarf species. I could never get any of them to eat cut fish though. They seem to like to eat head first, so small whole fish worked.
Fish-Story BS = black spotted eel is the third of the largest, 2.5+ footers. Interesting on the whole vs cut fish. Our TT and BS loved cut fish, whole fish, anything they could fit in their mouth, and pellets too.
gregfurey1104 Ah yes the black spotted eel. I'm not sure if that's still the third largest, they've found at least 2 new large eels that have been added to the genus in the last couple years. I think aquarium glacer in Germany have been selling them. I wonder if that just proves your point, maybe if I had continued feeding pellets and cut fish when I first got them they would have started taking them easier. Perhaps the continuous worm supply did make them fussier than they would have been otherwise.
Fish-Story Yes, I've seen a couple bigger-growing ones mentioned / offered for sale too, and then also saw some that top out at 1.5ft, IDK if those "bigger-growing ones" include the 1.5 footers or not. Need to take a look at the expanded Mastacembelus genus. ... As for the feeding, maybe yes, maybe no, outside of a controlled experiment where one group of eels is fed one way and the other group the other way, side by side, this is more of a guessing game. You are an analytical thinker, I like it.