what do i feed small spiny eels?

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Retuks

Fire Eel
MFK Member
Feb 19, 2009
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Kaneohe
i have no clue what affordable food i can feed small spiny eels...

my 3 charax "mini payara" are soooo fast, you could pour some brine shrimp, guppies, anything that moves in the water and in the blink of an eye they are gone before they swim down.

the two eels completely ignore hikari gold that i squeeze to sink to the bottom...

we dont sell can-o-worms here in hawaii. so what can i feed them?? i adopted a 8" spiny eel a week before this who was big enough to accept guppies but he swam out and died, since then i have 2 small 4-5" spinys and they are far too small to know about eating fish...
 
What species? You can feed them bloodworms, earthworms*, night crawlers*, krill*, etc.

-for the ones marked with *'s, they'll need to be cut into pieces that are small enough to be easily swallowed. Also, if you have one of the larger species (ex: M. armatus, M. erythrotaenia, M. favus, etc.), then bloodworms won't be an option once they are past 9-10".

And about feeding live fish, actually when my TT was about 5-6", it ate 2-3 adult zebra danios that I had used to cycle the tank, so I wouldn't think 8" eels would have any problem eating guppies.

Edit: Also, some people have had success getting their eels to accept pellets by stuffing them inside krill and/or other foods, but there's no guarantee that this will work for yours.

Another edit: nevermind about that part before the first edit, I just realized that you said your old eel was 8", not the new ones (I need to stop skimming threads).
 
brine shrimp would probably work.
 
my 3 charax "mini payara" are soooo fast, you could pour some brine shrimp, guppies, anything that moves in the water and in the blink of an eye they are gone before they swim down
Click to expand...

You could just hand feed them, which would eliminate the compition altogether.


^^^I forgot to address this in my first post and didn't want to add a third edit to that post, so I just made another post.
 
how would i hand feed guppies???

seems from what i seen with spiny eels this small, they like to eat things that move. the only way i can think of feeding guppies is to kill it first but then it wouldn't move.

petstore doesn't sell live worms... and their dead ones are like $8 for this little 3" plastic can of the stuff!!!

****...

their species is the common spiny eel. don't know the sci. name but they are generally the ones you always see at pet stores for 5 bucks small. they have rigid spines along their back and a brown python-like pattern on their body. some of them have a striped or spotted pattern. i have one with python pattern and one with kinda textured brown+black stripes but they are both from the same litter.
 
Retuks;4227768; said:
how would i hand feed guppies???

seems from what i seen with spiny eels this small, they like to eat things that move. the only way i can think of feeding guppies is to kill it first but then it wouldn't move.

petstore doesn't sell live worms... and their dead ones are like $8 for this little 3" plastic can of the stuff!!!

****...

their species is the common spiny eel. don't know the sci. name but they are generally the ones you always see at pet stores for 5 bucks small. they have rigid spines along their back and a brown python-like pattern on their body. some of them have a striped or spotted pattern. i have one with python pattern and one with kinda textured brown+black stripes but they are both from the same litter.
Click to expand...
I assume what you are describing is a zig-zag eel (M. circumcinctus). Amyway, yeah you really can't handfeed live feeders, which is why I didn't list them in my first post. Is there any way you could get krill or market shrimp?
 
i can get krill.. but only freeze dried in a 3" plastic can for like $8. i can also get blood worms (again, the dry one). krill looks sharp and fatal to eat. haha. so do i just smash them up in my hand and throw them all in?? what if it floats?

i tried feeding brine shrimp and everything else in my tank ate them but not my eels. had a few laying right infront of their fragile little noses!!
 
Retuks;4242131; said:
i can get krill.. but only freeze dried in a 3" plastic can for like $8. i can also get blood worms (again, the dry one). krill looks sharp and fatal to eat. haha. so do i just smash them up in my hand and throw them all in?? what if it floats?

i tried feeding brine shrimp and everything else in my tank ate them but not my eels. had a few laying right infront of their fragile little noses!!
Click to expand...
When I fed my eel f/d krill, I used to just soak them untill they were soft then hand feed them to my eel, then I got tired of waiting that long, so I just started soaking them for a couple minutes then de-shelled each one by hand before giving them to my eel, and I eventually got tired of having to do that as well, so now I just use frozen krill. When you have an eel in a community tank, you basically have to handfeed it or it will likely be underfed (especially with f/d foods b/c most of the time they won't sink unless you leave them in water for a very long time). I wonder if it's possible to freeze f/d krill (in water) to make them sink...
 
 
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