When you're transitioning your young gar off of fish and onto a prepared food, what are you feeding?
I've got several juvenile (2-3.5"...as of this morning anyway ;-) ) long nose gar that I've been feeding ad lib creek chub and mosquitofish fry to for a few weeks now. They're growing like weeds, are healthy, plump, and well adjusted to captivity...the most important things in my book. However, they're eating me out of house and home and I'm collecting large quantities of feeders at least twice a week! If I need to continue this routine for a while in order to keep these guys happy then that's fine, but I have read in various threads that LNG can be transitioned onto prepared foods (pellets) and some people start when they're quite young (~1.5" in one thread I read!). I have Hikari tropical food sticks (floating for top feeding carnivores) but these sticks are quite large in comparison to the size of the gar heads and I'm doubtful that they'd go for them as young as they are. I've been doing some searches and I'm not finding much in the way of WHAT people are transitioning their young gar to (brand and type of pellets, sticks, etc) when trying to move away from fish. While looking around today I came across Saki-Hikari's Marine Carnivore pellets that supposedly are slow-sinking. They look small enough for the youngsters to eat but are substantially higher in fat (12%) than the food sticks (4%), and while I can't see the ingredients for the marine pellets I'm going to assume that they contain the usual saltwater-type proteins (krill, brine shrimp, mysis, spirulina, etc). Would these be alright to try until they're large enough to eat the carnivore sticks? How do you get around not feeding such young fish ad lib? At most I could feed 3x a day, but am gone for work for ~10 hours solid during the day and couldn't feed during that time.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can give!
I've got several juvenile (2-3.5"...as of this morning anyway ;-) ) long nose gar that I've been feeding ad lib creek chub and mosquitofish fry to for a few weeks now. They're growing like weeds, are healthy, plump, and well adjusted to captivity...the most important things in my book. However, they're eating me out of house and home and I'm collecting large quantities of feeders at least twice a week! If I need to continue this routine for a while in order to keep these guys happy then that's fine, but I have read in various threads that LNG can be transitioned onto prepared foods (pellets) and some people start when they're quite young (~1.5" in one thread I read!). I have Hikari tropical food sticks (floating for top feeding carnivores) but these sticks are quite large in comparison to the size of the gar heads and I'm doubtful that they'd go for them as young as they are. I've been doing some searches and I'm not finding much in the way of WHAT people are transitioning their young gar to (brand and type of pellets, sticks, etc) when trying to move away from fish. While looking around today I came across Saki-Hikari's Marine Carnivore pellets that supposedly are slow-sinking. They look small enough for the youngsters to eat but are substantially higher in fat (12%) than the food sticks (4%), and while I can't see the ingredients for the marine pellets I'm going to assume that they contain the usual saltwater-type proteins (krill, brine shrimp, mysis, spirulina, etc). Would these be alright to try until they're large enough to eat the carnivore sticks? How do you get around not feeding such young fish ad lib? At most I could feed 3x a day, but am gone for work for ~10 hours solid during the day and couldn't feed during that time.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can give!
